I see the period of 1914 to 1941 as globalization crisis. And what I worry about is that we are to some extent repeating this.
There was a first globalization that starts in the 1870s. Things seem to be going pretty well—you know, Victorian theories of progress and so on, lots of global commerce, Suez Canal, Panama Canal. All these things which seem to be building one world. And then bang—there’s the First World War, and then the 1920s and ’30s, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. And you can see the Holocaust as the low point, the nadir, the final collapse of globalization, because globalization depends upon the idea that, ‘Hey we’re all human, let’s trade things, let’s trade ideas,’ whereas Hitlerian anti-Semitism has the idea that, in fact, some of us aren’t human and anything that’s going wrong in the world can be explained in reference to these unnatural beings.
I worry a little bit now about, just very generally, that with the financial crisis; with the instability in the Middle East; with the Chinese economy tanking; with Russia breaking all the rules in Europe; and with people in Russia, in Europe, in North Africa more freely expressing anti-Semitic views—I worry a bit that we are tilting towards some kind of anti-globalization where the Jews, or somebody else, could become the explanation for why things are going wrong.
The Half Has Never Been Told
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. 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. in the first half of the 18th century. 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. At the dawn of the Civil War, he suggests, the South’s perception that it was a “highly successful, innovative sector,” was coupled with slave-owners’ belief that objections to slavery in the North rested not on moral concerns, but on fears of “political bullying” from the slave states. Baptist’s chronicle exposes the taint of blood in virtually all of the wealth that Americans have inherited from their forebears, making it a rewarding read for anyone interested in U.S.A.’s dark history. (Sept.) —Publishers Weekly (link)
Reviews and comment:
Harvesting Cotton-Field Capitalism (New York Times)
A Brutal Process (New York Times)
EDWARD E. BAPTIST. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. (American History Review)
Blood cotton (Economist)
The Economist Is Sorry About Its ‘Not All Slave Masters’ Book Review (The Atlantic)
The Economist’s review of my book reveals how white people still refuse to believe black people about being black (The Guardian)
Hashtag: economistbookreviews (Twitter)