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

by Edward E. Baptist

the Mississippian who wrote that New Orleans would be the “port of exit for the redundant produce of the upper country—its sugar, tobacco, cotton, hemp”—was typical before 1815 in thinking that cotton came in third. He imagined that Louisiana’s main function would be to replace Saint-Domingue in the world circuit of sucrose.