The "New History of Capitalism" grounds the rise of industrial capitalism on the production of raw cotton by slaves. Recent works include Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams, Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton, and Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told. Although all of these authors analyze economic phenomena and all make fundamental errors in economic reasoning that affect their major interpretations, we will concentrate on Baptist's celebrated volume. He relies on our estimates showing that the quantity of cotton picked per slave per day quadruped between 1800 and 1860; but he dismisses the role of improved cotton varieties. Instead, he argues that the calibrated use of torture caused the increase. Baptist asserts enslavers employed a ratchet mechanism, whereby increases in current production led to higher future targets. We investigate the ratchet hypothesis, using our sample of cotton picking records for the period 1801-1862. This sample includes data from 114 separate plantations and a total of 397 plantation-years, covering 602,219 individual observations of daily cotton picking performed by 5,598 enslaved African-Americans. Our results suggest that Baptist's hypothesis is inconsistent with the data on picking. This finding should not be surprising given that the economics literature predicts that the adverse dynamic incentives effect of the ratcheting reduces production.

Consider chapters 1 through 6 to be Version 1.0. Chapters 2 through 6 have Information Cutoff Dates ranging between March 4, 2012 (Ch 2) and November 28, 2014 (Ch 3). I completely stand by the results of these chapters. They are published in current form to get the information out into the public domain. In Version 2.0, each chapter will be reduced in size, like Ch 1a, 1b, 1c, etc., revised and updated with more current information. The theoretical focus, while staying on Fourth Generation Warfare will expand to explain the underlying epistemological warfare of John Boyd,, with its sophisticated and complex Observe-Orient-Decide-Act Loop, Russia’s hybrid warfare, and the new Weaponized Narrative Initiative. The inclusion of the latter three ideas are necessary to explain the very real threat the United States is under—from the Christian Right, the Trumpichy regime, and Russia’s hybrid warfare which appeals to the Christian Right (anti-gay, anti-abortion, traditional values), while attempting to exploit and amplify racial, ethnic, gender, and ideological differences in American society. The main focus remains the Christian Right. However, given the close and strong support given by the Christian Right to Trump, additional chapters on Trump and Fourth Generation Warfare will be included in Version 2.0. At this stage, it is more important to put these chapters into the public domain for use by other researchers than to wait for them to be revised and updated.

The publication of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist was a mouthwatering development that significantly impacted the discourse analysis of America’s antebellum history. This book examines the macro-economics of slavery in United States history from a profoundly revisionist approach. It argues that the expansion of the institution of slavery created the wealth that financed the industrialization and modernization of the United States from 1783 to 1865. This challenges conventional interpretations that often portray slavery as a premodern economic institution largely isolated in time and detached from America’s socio-economic and political ideals and development that characterized the post-independence republic. This paper closely examines the methodological approaches and main arguments raised in chapters three, four and five of Baptist’s book. It argues that the full integration of the grim realities of the institution of slavery in these chapters is a sad tale of folly, a half that has now been told but that should be taken with a grain of salt.

A review of historian Edward Baptist's most recent work that examines the link between slavery and the rise of capitalism in America. Click the URL above to read the review.

This review essay explores the topic of capitalism and slavery in recent books by Walter Johnson, Edward Baptist and Sven Beckert. It argues that these authors fail to provide a coherent account of capitalism. This, in turn, leads them to make confused or misleading claims about, e.g., the nature of slaveowner violence, the dynamics of productivity growth, and the origins of the industrial revolution. An alternative conception of capitalist slavery is proposed, drawing on the work of Robert Brenner, that is hoped will provide a better foundation for this perennial debate.

This essay examines a longstanding normative assumption in the historiography of slavery in the Atlantic world: that enslaved Africans and their American-born descendants were bought and sold as “commodities,” thereby “dehumanizing” them and treating them as things rather than as persons. Such claims have, indeed, helped historians conceptualize how New World slavery contributed to the ongoing development of global finance capitalism—namely, that slaves represented capital as well as labor. But the recurring paradigm of the “dehumanized” or “commodified” slave, I argue, obscures more than it reveals. This article suggests that historians of slavery must reconsider the “commodification” of enslaved humanity. In so doing, it offers three interrelated arguments: first, that scholarship on slavery has not adequately or coherently defined the precise mechanisms by which enslaved people were supposedly “commodified”; second, that the normative position implied by the insistence that persons were treated as things further mystifies or clouds our collective historical vision of enslavement; and third, that we should abandon a strictly Marxian conception of the commodity—and its close relation to notions of “social death”—in favor of Igor Kopytoff’s theory of the commodity-as-process. It puts forth in closing a reconstituted conceptualization of the slave relation wherein enslaved people are understood as thoroughly human.

This is a draft of a book in preparation. Although the Introduction refers to the book in three parts, it is far more likely that the book will eventually be published as three books--one on the Christian Right, one on the Patriot militia movement as the armed wing of the Christian Right, and the third on the Tea Party movement. Holding all three books together are Fourth Generation Warfare (introduced in Book Two) and the Christian Right's organization, strategy, and key leadership personnel present in all three phases of the Christian Right.