The New History of Capitalism.



By the twenty-first century, the slavery debates among economists had become quiescent. One major subsequent contribution is Olmstead and Rhode’s “Biological Innovation and Productivity Growth in the Antebellum Cotton Economy” (2008). They found that average daily cotton-picking rates quadrupled between 1801 and 1862, mainly due to new cotton varieties. But among historians, those describing their own work as part of a “New History of Capitalism” now claim that slavery was the primary source of overall U.S. economic growth in the antebellum period. Two of their major works are Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014) and Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told (2014). While embracing the finding that slavery was productive, these historians otherwise largely ignore all previous work of economists. Yet the idea that slavery was essential for cotton production, which drove national growth, is belied by the fact that just five years after the Civil War’s end the physical amount of cotton produced was approaching its prewar peak, mainly because of increased acreage devoted to cotton cultivation, despite the fall in southern real income.

Baptist went so far as to ignore Olmstead and Rhode’s explanation for the increase in cotton-picking rates, attributing it instead to a whipping regime of calibrated torture, steadily increasing over sixty years. Horrendous as torture is, the claim that it could account for productivity continually increasing for more than half a century is implausible on its face. Ignorance of national income accounting and Baptist’s double counting led him to attribute almost half of U.S. economic activity in 1836 to cotton production. Although cotton was the largest U.S. export, it never exceeded 5 percent of GDP. Olmstead and Rhode (2018) offers a comprehensive and scathing critique of the New History of Capitalism’s works on slavery.

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