Bob CollinsThe Economist today took down the book review that suggested that slavery had its good points.
In an editor’s note, The Economist acknowledged it shouldn’t have been posted, and then reposted the review “in the interest of transparency.”
Apology: In our review of “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” by Edward Baptist, we said: “Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.”
There has been widespread criticism of this, and rightly so. Slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks, and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil.
We regret having published this and apologise for having done so. We have therefore withdrawn the review, but in the interests of transparency the text remains available only on this special page and appears below.
Unexplained in the note, however, is an explanation of where the editor was when he/she/it allowed it to be posted in the first place.
