The “massive markets,” “accelerating growth,” and new economic institutions in America’s “nexus of cotton, slaves, and credit” lend credence to Baptist’s insistence that common conceptions of the slave South as economically doomed from the start are possible only in hindsight. Delivered in a voice that fluidly incorporates both academic objectivity and coarse language, the book is organized into chapters named after a slave’s body parts (i.e., “Heads” and “Arms”), brutal images reinforced by the “metastatic rate” of the “endlessly expanding economy” of slavery in the U.S. Cornell University historian Baptist ( Creating an Old South) delivers an unapologetic, damning, and grisly account of slavery’s foundational place in the emergence of America as a global superpower, balancing the macro lens of statistics and national trends with intimate slave narratives.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |