The Half Has Never Been Told

Historian Edward E. Baptist argues that slavery was central to the making of American capitalism rather than a pre-modern institution cut off from the nation's later success. Within a single lifetime, he shows, the South grew from a coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations into a continental cotton empire. Enslavers and slave traders acted as entrepreneurs, using enslaved people to grow cotton, the dominant global commodity, and as collateral for finance. Baptist also traces how banks and credit fed land speculation in the Old Southwest, and examines New Orleans and the Haitian Revolution. Sources include newspapers, plantation records and slave narratives such as Charles Ball's. The book won the 2015 Hillman Prize.

Facebook engineering vice president Cory Ondrejka called it a painful but revealing look at the comfortable ways America remembers slavery and its tie to modern capitalism, and said every American should read it.