'The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery And The Making Of American Capitalism'

[applegrove]

'The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery And The Making Of American Capitalism'

by Susan Grigsby at the Daily Kos

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/21/1330771/--The-Half-Has-Never-Been-Told-Slavery-and-the-Making-of-American-Capitalism

"SNIP.......................

In this story of American slavery, and its intimate connection to American capitalism, Baptist demonstrates how the availability of cheap land, slave labor and a government willing to support it can create huge amounts of wealth. Enough wealth to help fund an industrial revolution.

......

Unfortunately, there is absolutely no evidence that it was either inefficient or that it was dying out. On the contrary, the cheap and ready availability of stolen lands and easy credit due to creative financial instruments, combined with the slave labor that the laws allowed, encouraged and protected, led to a boom in cotton production that showed little signs of slowing by 1860.

In 1860, the Southern slave labor camps provided 88 percent of the cotton used in Great Britain's cotton mills. Cotton had become the number one trading commodity of the entire world. It fueled the industrial revolution, feeding not just the cotton mills of Britain, but also the ones in towns like Lowell, Massachusetts. The cotton mills of Lowell were built with the profits made from the unpaid labor of African Americans in the slave labor camps. Cotton went from 14 percent of the total American exports in 1802 to 61 percent by 1860. The United States share of the worldwide cotton market climbed from one percent in 1801 to 66 percent by 1860.

As new lands were opened by the Louisiana Purchase and the forced eviction of almost 50,000 Native Americans from the lands to which they held title, slavery moved from the coastal states of the Old South to the new Southwest. Foreclosed from importing new slaves to work the new land by the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of 1807, slave traders forced the migration of one million slaves:







..........................SNIP"

[elleng]

1. Molasses to Rum to Slaves

[littlemissmartypants]

2. Thanks for your post, applegrove. Have you considered cross posting

In good reads? I think it's an interesting read and something that needs never be forgotten.

Love, Peace and Shelter.
~ littlemissmartypants

[applegrove]

3. I tend not to cross post because then it will show up double on the Latest Forum.

But yeah. Important to tell this part of American History. I had posted about the controversy with the Economist article but did not pursue the actual book. My bad. Till I saw this.

[scarletlib]

4. I just finished reading this book.

It is very well written and has an amazing amount of historical and statistical evidence to support the book's central hypothesis. It is another addition to the growing body of literature exposing the real truths of slavery and Jim Crow.

You cannot read these books and fail to realize the degree of exploitation of African-Americans and how much wealth has been generated for individual whites as well as for the nation as a whole.

I am a true believer that we as a nation owe reparations in some form to our African-American brothers and sisters. But we will never be able to truly repay them for what they suffered and lost by our treatment of them.

[alterfurz]

5. I'll take U.S. History for $400, Alex...

[TBF]

6. Should be required reading. K&R nt

[Sunlei]

7. yes, and then slavery rose again through our prison system & Corps leased prison slaves.

Still continues today, cheap workers through our prison systems.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

8. It seems to ignore the fact that the free states of the North won the Civil War due to their

economic / industrial superiority.

The Spartans relied on slaves but were hardly capitalists. Likewise slave labor didn't save the command economies of Imperialist Japan or fascist Germany.

It's dangerous to fight wars when you rely on hostage populations.

[hedda_foil]

9. The book discussed in the OP includes all the economic strands you bring up.

Here's a link to a long except from the book, itself: http://www.salon.com/2014/09/07/we_still_lie_about_slavery_heres_the_truth_about_how_the_american_economy_and_power_were_built_on_forced_migration_and_torture/

[malaise]

10. And they want back 'their' good old days

and if we ever give them a chance, slavery will be back