In The Half Has Never Been Told, historian Edward E.Baptist reveals the alarming extent to which slavery shaped our countrypolitically, morally, and most of all, economically. Until the Civil War, ourchief form of innovation was slavery. Through forced migration and torture,slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from their slaves,giving the country a virtual monopoly on the production of cotton, a key rawmaterial of the Industrial Revolution.As Baptist argues, this frenzy of speculation and economicexpansion transformed the United States into a modern capitalist nation. Basedon thousands of slave narratives and plantation records, The Half Has NeverBeen Told offers not only a radical revision of the history of slavery buta disturbing new understanding of the origins of American power that compels listenersto reckon with the violence and subjugation at the root of American supremacy.