Edward E. Baptist (born 1970) is an American academic and writer. He is a professor of

history History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well ...

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

, located in

Ithaca, New York Ithaca is a city in the Finger Lakes region of New York, United States. Situated on the southern shore of Cayuga Lake, Ithaca is the seat of Tompkins County and the largest community in the Ithaca metropolitan statistical area. It is named ...

, where he specializes in the history of the 19th-century United States, particularly the South. Thematically, he has been interested in the

history of capitalism The history of capitalism is diverse and the concept of capitalism has many debated roots. The history of the past 500 years is concerned with the development of capitalism in its various forms. Capital accumulated by a variety of methods, at a v ...

and has also been interested in

digital humanities Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or Information technology, digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanitie ...

methodologies. He is the author of numerous books.

Early life and education

Baptist was born in 1970 in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...

, but he grew up in Durham, North Carolina.Profile
''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

''. He graduated from

Georgetown University Georgetown University is a private university, private research university in the Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded by Bishop John Carroll (archbishop of Baltimore), John Carroll in 1789 as Georg ...

and in 1997 earned his doctorate from

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, largest city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the List of United States cities by population, sixth-largest city i ...

Career

Baptist is a professor of

at Cornell University. His areas of interest are 19th-century United States and especially the history of enslavement in America. Baptist is the author of many articles and books including '' The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism'' and the award-winning ''Creating an Old South''. In September 2014, Baptist's work came to prominence when ''

The Economist ''The Economist'' is a British weekly newspaper printed in demitab format and published digitally. It focuses on current affairs, international business, politics, technology, and culture. Based in London, the newspaper is owned by The Eco ...

'' published a review of ''The Half Has Never Been Told'', criticizing Baptist's thesis that growth in cotton productivity was driven primarily by increasing cruelty. The review sparked widespread outrage for its statement, "Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy." This prompted a rare withdrawal of the article and an apology from the magazine. Baptist wrote a response in ''

Politico ''Politico'' (stylized in all caps), known originally as ''The Politico'', is an American, German-owned political journalism newspaper company based in Arlington County, Virginia, that covers politics and policy in the United States and intern ...

'' magazine in which he states,

Had the ''Economist'' actually engaged the book's arguments, the reviewer would have had to confront the scary fact that the unrestrained domination of market forces can sometimes amplify existing forms of oppression into something more horrific. No wonder the ''Economist'' abandoned its long-standing intellectual commitments in favor of sloppy old paternalism on Sept. 4, because if it hadn't, Mr./Ms. Anonymous might have had to admit that
market fundamentalism Market fundamentalism, also known as free-market fundamentalism, is a term applied to a strong belief in the ability of unregulated ''laissez-faire'' or free-market capitalist policies to solve most economic and social problems. It is often used ...
doesn't always provide the best solution for every economic or social problem.

''The Half Has Never Been Told'' received mixed reviews from academics. A number of historians, including

Eric Foner Eric Foner (; born February 7, 1943) is an American historian. He writes extensively on American political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African-American biography, the American Civil War, Reconstruc ...

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

and

Daina Ramey Berry Daina Ramey Berry is an American historian and academic who is the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She was formerly the associate dean of the graduate school and chair of the hist ...

of the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,07 ...

, have praised the book.

Economic historians Economic history is the academic learning of economies or economic events of the past. Research is conducted using a combination of historical methods, statistical methods and the application of economic theory to historical situations and in ...

have sharply criticized ''The Half Has Never Been Told''. Reviewing the book in ''The Journal of Economic History'' (JEH), Alan Olmstead writes, "Edward Baptist’s study of capitalism and slavery is flawed beyond repair." Olmstead criticizes Baptist's "torture hypothesis" that increasing cruelty drove increases in cotton picking output, citing research that finds that increases in productivity resulted primarily from planting of improved cotton varieties. Olmstead additionally writes that "carelessness with numbers when coupled with his fundamental misunderstanding of economic logic" leads Baptist to vastly overstate the importance of cotton to the antebellum American economy. In a separate review of the book in the JEH, Eric Hilt writes, "much of its economic analysis is so flawed that it undermines the credibility of the book." Hilt argues that Baptist's calculation of the share of cotton in antebellum America's

Gross Domestic Product Gross domestic product (GDP) is a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced and sold (not resold) in a specific time period by countries. Due to its complex and subjective nature this measure is oft ...

"is a disastrously mishandled undertaking, full of obvious manipulations that overstate cotton's contribution." A 2020 study in the ''Economic History Review'' rejects Baptist's thesis that slavery was necessary for American economic development. In 2017, Baptist was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for a new project on the history of the policing of African Americans from Jamestown to Ferguson.

Personal life

Baptist lives in

Bibliography

* (2002). ''Creating an Old South: Middle Florida's Plantation Frontier before the Civil War''.

University of North Carolina Press The University of North Carolina Press (or UNC Press), founded in 1922, is a university press that is part of the University of North Carolina. It was the first university press founded in the Southern United States. It is a member of the As ...

. . * (2006). ''New Studies in the History of American Slavery''.

University of Georgia Press The University of Georgia Press or UGA Press is the university press of the University of Georgia, a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Athens, Georgia. It is the oldest and largest publishing house in Georgia and a ...

. * (2014). ''American Capitalism: A Reader''. Louis Hyman and Edward E. Baptist.

Simon & Schuster Simon & Schuster () is an American publishing company and a subsidiary of Paramount Global. It was founded in New York City on January 2, 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. As of 2016, Simon & Schuster was the third largest pu ...

. * (2014). '' The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism''. Basic Books.

References

External links