Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism w/ Edward Baptist

The Road to Now

Benjamin Sawyer

Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2023

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Slavery was an integral part of the American republic from the moment of independence until the abolition of the so-called "peculiar institution" with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865. The social and economic impact of the slave system, however, are much larger in terms of both time and geography. In this episode, Bob and Ben speak with Edward Baptist about slavery's origins, its evolution, and how enslaved people's work laid the foundation for modern capitalism. He also shares stories of the people who suffered under- and those who profited from- the inhumane system of American slavery.

Dr. Edward E. Baptist is Professor of History at Cornell University and author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014), which won the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize.

This is an enhanced rebroadcast of RTN #117, which originally aired on January 14, 2019. This episode was edited by Ben Sawyer.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Ben Sawyer and this is the Road to Now.
0:09.4	Greetings from Gallup, New Mexico, where I have stopped with the family at the end of the first day of a three-day road trip from Long Beach, California.
0:18.0	Back to Nashville, Tennessee. I've been on the road for the last month. As some of you guys
0:22.2	know, Bob has been out a lot out there entertaining the masses with the Ava brothers. And so we have
0:28.1	been sharing some of the great episodes of the past with you guys. And so is the same today.
0:34.6	Today's episode that we are resharing is our conversation from 2018 with Edward
0:39.3	Baptist on the history of American slavery. Ed wrote the book, The Half Has Never Been
0:44.1	Told, Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. It is an incredible book. I'm telling
0:50.6	you, if you were interested in the history of capitalism or slavery or just general American history, this is your go-to. Now, this conversation is brilliant, but when we've
1:00.1	gone back to re-air some old episodes, one of the things that will always make me a bit hesitant
1:04.6	is if we had like some sketchy audio quality. And at this time in 2018, before Bob and I had really figured all this
1:12.0	distance recording out, we had some kind of scratchy audio. But I recently learned, thanks to our
1:18.1	producer Gary Fletcher, that Adobe now has an AI-generated audio recovery software program that you
1:25.6	can upload tracks to. And it will take these kind of scratchy, not so good clips.
1:30.7	This may have even been from Skype.
1:32.2	That's how long ago it was.
1:33.4	And it will actually restore them.
1:36.1	And so with this episode, in order to do that, I went back and re-edited the entire thing.
1:40.9	So why am I going on about this?
1:42.4	Well, just for two reasons.
1:43.7	Number one, because I like it when the podcast sounds good. But number two, because I want anyone out there who's listening who is a podcaster who has a similar situation, maybe you're even still recording in a way that you're not getting the audio you like, go check it out. This isn't a paid spot. I don't know if Adobe's the only one. It's included in a subscription. If you've got one, there may be other ones. But, man, it has opened up a whole new world in terms of re-airing these episodes because we're actually putting out what I think is a much better audio version of the older episodes, and therefore, it's a delight to re-edit. So we hope you enjoy this.
2:19.4	Even as someone who was in the room for this conversation, going back and listening to it again
	...

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