Abstract
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist is reviewed. Baptist asserts that enslaved persons constituted the most attractive kind of collateral in the Western world. Slavery's attractiveness seemed to be confirmed by the Anglo-American financial situation in which banks continued to loan significant sums to enslavers. Bankers, Baptist argues, seemed convinced that slavery would remain viable for the foreseeable future. Baptist's work argues viscerally but somewhat incompletely that American slavery easily coexisted with American capitalism, but his larger polemical point that capitalism by nature is only exploitive seems less convincing.