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THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
Shackles and Dollars
Historians and economists clash over slavery
By Marc Parry DECEMBER 08, 2016 PREMIUM
For Edward E. Baptist, the scandal was a gift. It had taken the Cornell
University historian over a dozen years to produce a study tracing the
creation of American capitalism to the expansion of slavery. It took
less than one day for a short book review to turn his 400-page narrative
into a cause célèbre.
The inciting review appeared in The Economist magazine. It faulted
Baptist’s study, The Half Has Never Been Told (Basic Books, 2014), for
exaggerating the brutality of bondage based on the questionable
testimony of "a few slaves." Baptist fired back in Politico and The
Guardian. The magazine’s critique, he wrote, "revealed just how many
white people remain reluctant to believe black people about the
experience of being black." The Economist, widely denounced online,
published an apology.
The controversy stimulated both public discussion of slavery and sales
of Baptist’s book. Within academe, though, some think it had another
effect: to squelch debate over The Half Has Never Been Told. Skeptical
scholars may have been wary of criticizing its arguments for fear of
being perceived as apologists for slavery.
That silence is breaking. In a series of recent papers and scholarly
talks, economists, along with some historians, have begun to raise
serious questions about Baptist’s scholarship. Their critiques echo
parts of the Economist review, only this time backed up by reams of
economic research. The attack is notable because it has expanded beyond
The Half Has Never Been Told to assail the wider movement to which that
book belongs.
Over the past several years, a series of books has reshaped how
historians view the connection between slavery and capitalism. These
works show the role that coercion played in bringing about a modern
market system that is more typically identified with freedom. At a
moment of rising frustration with racial and economic inequality, they
have won a level of attention and acclaim that academics dream about but
almost never get. Some think the books’ forensic accounting of how slave
labor was stolen may buttress the case for reparations.
What the economists are now assembling amounts to a battering ram aimed
at the empirical foundations of these studies, which include Walter
Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom
(Harvard University Press) and Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global
History (Knopf). The critics, whose own scholarship stakes out similar
turf, say the new histories are riddled with errors, make overblown
claims, or distort evidence to suit their story lines.
"The shocking thing is how far they have deviated from the traditional
strengths of history, in terms of using evidence and evaluating
arguments," says Paul W. Rhode, who chairs the economics department at
the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and until recently served as
co-editor of The Journal of Economic History.
The clash is a reckoning for two disciplines that have long developed in
isolation. Some researchers believe that economic history would gain
strength if historians and economists worked together. By September,
though, the sniping over slavery had gotten so nasty that one scholar
trying to build bridges between the camps, Caitlin Rosenthal, described
herself as "kind of terrified." Rosenthal, a historian at the University
of California at Berkeley, was about to visit Dartmouth College to speak
at a public debate in which Baptist would confront the economists face
to face. "I have no idea what’s going to happen," she said, adding,
"It’s possible that it’s going to just be a huge fight."
The best way to understand this fight is to take a closer look at the
book that has caused the most friction, The Half Has Never Been Told.
When you think about the slave trade, what probably comes to mind are
the voyages that brought some 600,000 to 650,000 African captives across
the Atlantic to the territories that would eventually become the United
States. The heart of Baptist’s study is a different slave migration, one
that took place within those states.
Between about 1790 and 1860, traders and owners moved some one million
enslaved people from older states like Virginia and Maryland to newer
territories within the South’s dynamically expanding cotton economy. The
slaves were marched in chains or shipped on boats to lands the U.S. had
acquired from other empires and cleared of native peoples. At first,
they ended up
