The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

One of the overarching themes of the book is the idea that the slavery that occurred on the cotton plantations and which is so central to the story of America’s rise to prominence diverges from older models of slavery in the Americas. This new model of slavery happens on a far-larger scale but it is also different in several other ways. Firstly, it is marked from the offset by large-scale forced migration into new territories as “almost 1 million people [are] herded down the road into the new slavery” (2) between the 1780s and 1860s. However, there are other shifts as well. Perhaps the most significant is the change in what is expected of enslaved people. Under older models of American slavery, enslaved people “rose in status by learning trades” (103) and acquiring “[s]kills meant that one could claim some authority over a task and tools, a kind of capital accumulated during a unique past” (104). However, under new slavery “[e]nslavers [want] to buy people who [have] no claim to a special status” (102), who are not only suited to the monotonous work of cotton picking but can also be easily reduced to “a commodity: alienable, easily sold, and in important ways, rendered effectively identical for white entrepreneurs’ direct manipulation” (101).