And once the violence of slavery was minimized, another voice could whisper, saying that African Americans, both before and after emancipation, were denied the rights of citizens because they would not fight for them. Yet the massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire-this vanished in the story of a slavery that was supposedly focused primarily not on producing profit but on maintaining its status as a quasi-feudal elite, or producing modern ideas about race in order to maintain white unity and elite power. From those who survived, it stole everything. But slavery also killed people, in large numbers. It did those things as a matter of course, and as injustice, that denial ranks with the greatest in modern history. Rather, he says, it was woven inextricably into the transnational fabric of early 19th-century capitalism. He asserts that slavery was neither inherently inefficient nor a counterpoint to capitalism. Baptist takes passionate issue with such assumptions. “Third, the worst thing about slavery as an experience, one is told, was that it denied enslaved African Americans the liberal rights and liberal subjectivity of modern citizens. In The Half Has Never Been Told, Edward E.
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