[2] Baptist is the author of many articles and books including The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism and the award-winning Creating an Old South.
[4] Baptist wrote a response in Politico magazine in which he states, Had the Economist actually engaged the book's arguments, the reviewer would have had to confront the scary fact that the unrestrained domination of market forces can sometimes amplify existing forms of oppression into something more horrific.
[8][9][10][11][6] Reviewing the book in The Journal of Economic History (JEH), Alan Olmstead writes, "Edward Baptist’s study of capitalism and slavery is flawed beyond repair."
Olmstead additionally writes that "carelessness with numbers when coupled with his fundamental misunderstanding of economic logic" leads Baptist to vastly overstate the importance of cotton to the antebellum American economy.
[13] In 2017, Baptist was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for a new project on the history of the policing of African Americans from Jamestown to Ferguson.