One Without The Other

This morning I decided to finish “The Half That Was Never Told.” by the Cornell professor Edward E. Baptist.  His thesis suggests that rather than a backward, preindustrial process, bound to die out before long anyway, competing as it was against the budding industrialism of the north, the industrialism of England, slavery based production of cotton was in fact a fine-tuned torturing of human endurance to extract maximum cotton output from work on large plantations, which fed the mills of England and New England.  The Industrial Revolution these places led, was fueled in part by the monstrously stern extraction of maximum output by slaves under the threat of the whip and worse.  You couldn't have had the one without the other. 

Having read three complementary, earlier histories of the institution and the aftermath one after the other before reading his work, I take note of how anchored Baptist’s history is in perspectives of slaves themselves.  Slaves are not mere toiling masses, and numbers and statistics.  In a corporeal treatment which focuses on the hands of slaves and the necks of slaves and the backs and blood of slaves and we are never far away from one or another enchained protagonist being transported from Virginia or Maryland on to the new cotton-fields of Alabama, Mississippi and ultimately east Texas.  I noted the discomfort of being unable to escape the central, human indignity with every chapter. 

No better place to take up from the ‘World War II in Color”, meat and potatoes overview of the great conflict, we finished the other night, with a similarly simple, in-color summary of the Korean War conflict, which followed not long after.  My younger daughter, who is the Korea-phile in the house stormed off in the end asserting that “The Korean War was the dumbest war ever.  They all killed each other for three years and nothing changed.”  Superlatives aside, all that was accomplished surely left neither side with much of any advantages the didn’t otherwise have, beyond the blood soaked loyalty of the allies that they fought alongside with. 

Her maternal grandfather fought as a Chinese volunteer in that war against American aggression.  Her paternal step-father was enlisted during that war against the expansion of “communist slavery.”  And now she wants to know about what would happen if the North fell.  What would it mean to China and to Russia and to all Koreans?  We seem to have caught her attention.  I signed up today as a PBS donor so that I could have access to another complementary history:  “Korea:  The Endless War” which we’re talking about having a glance at later this evening. 

Thursday, 5/28/20