23 Quotes by Edward E. Baptist

By 1775, 500,000 of the thirteen colonies' 2.5 million inhabitants were slaves

By the 1780s, many white Americans and a growing cadre of British reformers believed that modern civilized nations could no longer engage in the brutalities of the Middle Passage

Before the Haitian Revolution, Africans toiling in the sugar fields of Saint-Domingue spread the story of the zombi. This was a living-dead person who had been captured by white wizards. Intellect and personality fled home, but the ghost-spirit and body remained in the land of the dead, working at the will of the sorcerers-planters. Any slave could be a zombi..." - The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

But when one takes Lorenzo Ivy’s words as a starting point, the whole history of the United States comes walking over the hill behind a line of people in chains.

As of 1807, four out of every five people who came from the Old World to the New had come from Africa, not Europe; chained in the belly of a ship, not free on its deck. Huddled.

The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.

Moreover, the 3.2 million people enslaved in the United States had a market value of $1.3 billion in 1850 – one-fifth of the nation’s wealth and almost equal to the entire gross national product. They were more liquid than other forms of American property, even if an acre of land couldn’t run away or kill an overseer with an axe.14.

In a broader sense, much of this story about the expansion of slavery and how it shaped the lives of black folks and the wider world is driven by the white men who tried to impose their codes on everything around them.

And everyone who teaches about slavery knows a little dirty secret that reveals historians’ collective failure: many African-American students struggle with a sense of shame that most of their ancestors could not escape the suffering they experienced.