The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

by Edward E. Baptist

the new dynamic growth of Western capitalism was producing massive quantities of what the great twentieth-century theologian Robert Farrar Capon called “right-handed power”: the strength to force an outcome. Capon identified right-handed power as being like the idea of God held by many believers of many religions: a deity working in straight-line ways, exerting crushing force, throwing the wicked into the flames, drowning the sinful earth. Right-handed power is the power of domination, kings, weapons, and the letter of the law. In the early nineteenth century, those societies and individuals who were winning in the sorting-out of power and status accumulated unprecedented right-handed strength. They got more guns and bullets, more soldiers, the ability to knock down other peoples’ defenses and force them to trade on the terms most favorable to the West. They dominated other peoples to a degree unprecedented in human history, and within victorious new modernized nations, right-handed power was increasingly distributed in a lop-sided fashion.