Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management
by Caitlin Rosenthal  (Author)

About the Author
Caitlin Rosenthal returned to Harvard for her Ph.D. in history after three years with McKinsey & Company. A finalist for the Nevins Prize in Economic History and winner of the Krooss Prize for the Best Dissertation in Business History at Harvard University, she was a Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Business School and is now Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.

About this book
“Slavery in the United States was a business. A morally reprehensible―and very profitable business…Rosenthal argues that slaveholders in the American South and Caribbean were using advanced management and accounting techniques long before their northern counterparts. Techniques that are still used by businesses today.” ―Marketplace
A Politico Great Weekend Read
Accounting for Slavery is a unique contribution to the decades-long effort to understand New World slavery’s complex relationship with capitalism. Through careful analysis of plantation records, Caitlin Rosenthal explores the development of quantitative management practices on West Indian and Southern plantations. She shows how planter-capitalists built sophisticated organizational structures and even practiced an early form of scientific management. They subjected enslaved people to experiments, such as allocating and reallocating labor from crop to crop, planning meals and lodging, and carefully recording daily productivity. The incentive strategies they crafted offered rewards but also threatened brutal punishment.
The traditional story of modern management focuses on the factories of England and New England, but Rosenthal demonstrates that investors in West Indian and Southern plantations used complex accounting practices, sometimes before their Northern counterparts. For example, some planters depreciated their human capital decades before the practice was a widely used accounting technique. Contrary to narratives that depict slavery as a barrier to innovation, Accounting for Slavery explains how elite planters turned their power over enslaved people into a productivity advantage. The brutality of slavery was readily compatible with the development of new quantitative techniques for workforce organization.
By showing the many ways that business innovation can be a byproduct of bondage, Rosenthal further erodes the false boundary between capitalism and slavery and illuminates deep parallels between the outlooks of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slaveholders and the ethical dilemmas facing twenty-first-century businesses.

Table of contents
Introduction 1
1. Hierarchies of Life and Death 9
2. Forms of Labor 49
3. Slavery’s Scientific Management 85
4. Human Capital 121
5. Managing Freedom 157
Conclusion: Histories of Business and Slavery 187
Postscript: Forward to Scientific Management 199
Notes 207
Acknowledgments 277
Index 283

Length: 312 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press (August 27, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0674972090
ISBN-13: 978-0674972094