Edward Baptist's research focuses on the history of the 19th-century United States, and in particular on the history of the enslavement of African Americans in the South. 

The expansion of slavery in the United States between the writing of the Constitution in 1787 and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 had enormous consequences for all Americans. He is writing a book about the experience of the slave trades and forced migrations that drove expansion, the systems of labor that emerged, the economic and political and cultural consequences for women and men and children.