caitlin rosenthal accounting for slavery

As Rosenthal writes, “Systematic accounting practices,” like maintaining records of individual productivity, “thrived on antebellum plantations-not despite the chattel principle, but because of it.”ĭrawing on Rosenthal’s interdisciplinary background in labor and business history as well as economics, Accounting for Slavery has what the author calls an “eclectic setup.” Rather than delving into a single geography and moment in time, as an historian might, Rosenthal organizes chapters by specific “innovations of business history, like the development of organizational hierarchies.” She tracks these innovations on plantations throughout the nineteenth-century West Indies and the American South, drawing parallels to the nineteenth-century North and modern economy. The control and consistency of an enslaved workforce facilitated these innovations, allowing managers to keep careful records and experiment freely-even as hints of escape or resistance in the account books demonstrate enslaved people’s efforts to subvert that control. Instead, they demonstrate that plantation owners employed innovative management techniques, from multidivisional organizational structures and standardization (like the use of identical records that “could be compared across multiple plantations and over time”) to depreciation and nascent forms of scientific management, whereby workers are thought of as “inputs of production” and tracked meticulously to increase productivity. Plantation account books, she argues, undermine this narrative of mutual progress. From this mindset, Rosenthal explains, “it is possible to craft a really triumphant narrative of American business,” in which economic freedom and human rights advance together.

Slavery is often understood as an impediment to the development of American capitalism-a failure of both morals and business.

“The goal of the project,” which began with her dissertation, she says, “was to write slavery back into the history of American business.” From this interaction was born Accounting for Slavery, just published by Harvard University Press, in which Rosenthal examines such records to understand slaveholders’ management and accounting techniques. A standardized journal kept by plantation owners, the Account Book tracked metrics like slave productivity. Engerman of the University of Rochester, a quantitative economic historian and pioneer in studying the economics of slavery, gave her a copy of Thomas Affleck’s Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book, published annually between 18. Her focus moved southward when visiting professor Stanley L.

Caitlin rosenthal accounting for slavery