Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

  • The Half Has Never Been Told

  • Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
  • By: Edward E Baptist
  • Narrated by: Ron Butler
  • Length: 19 hrs and 47 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (6 ratings)
Offer ends May 1st, 2024 11:59PM GMT. Terms and conditions apply.
£7.99/month after 3 months. Renews automatically.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
The Half Has Never Been Told cover art

The Half Has Never Been Told

By: Edward E Baptist
Narrated by: Ron Butler
Get this deal Try for £0.00

Pay £99p/month. After 3 months pay £7.99/month. Renews automatically. See terms for eligibility.

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £16.99

Buy Now for £16.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

Bound for Canaan cover art
Slavery's Capitalism cover art
Jacksonland cover art
Destruction of Black Civilization cover art
The Souls of Black Folk cover art
The Strange Career of Jim Crow cover art
Lone Star cover art
Accounting for Slavery cover art
Born in Blackness cover art
The Internal Enemy cover art
The Burning cover art
The Making of America: Volume 1 cover art
Half American cover art
The Wars of Reconstruction cover art
The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States cover art
White Malice cover art

Summary

Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians

Winner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize

A groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people

Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution - the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy.

Told through the intimate testimonies of survivors of slavery, plantation records, newspapers, as well as the words of politicians and entrepreneurs, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.

©2016 Edward E Baptist (P)2021 Basic Books
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

Critic reviews

"Abolitionists were contemptuous of such self-serving nonsense, but they too tended to see slavery as an economically inefficient, and morally reprehensible, hangover from the premodern past. In The Half Has Never Been Told, Edward E. Baptist takes passionate issue with such assumptions. He asserts that slavery was neither inherently inefficient nor a counterpoint to capitalism. Rather, he says, it was woven inextricably into the transnational fabric of early 19th-century capitalism. Baptist writes with verve and a good eye for the dramatic.” (Wall Street Journal)

"Baptist's work is a valuable addition to the growing literature on slavery and American development. Baptist has a knack for explaining complex financial matters in lucid prose. [The Half Has Never Been Told's] underlying argument is persuasive.” (New York Times Book Review)

"The overwhelming power of the stories that Baptist recounts, and the plantation-level statistics he's compiled, give his book the power of truth and revelation." (Los Angeles Times)

What listeners say about The Half Has Never Been Told

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    3
  • 4 Stars
    3
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    5
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    3
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Very good introduction to the complexity of slavery and it’s economy and the emergence of transatlantic capitalism.

Very good introduction to the complexity of slavery and it’s economy and the emergence of transatlantic capitalism.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Good but full of myopic statements

Absolutely, we need to have the conversation this book is bringing to the front: there are a lot of positives and great points explained in great details, however doesn’t seem that the author researched the topic in the depth that is required cover the subject. If u consider only slavery in the USA on its own u are missing 95% of the picture: slave trade was globalized goods business and the South USA was rather a back water as opposed to dominant force.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!