Caitlin Rosenthal. Accounting for Slavery

In her ambitious first book, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, Caitlin Rosenthal, a former management consultant turned historian, insightfully analyzes North American slaveholders’ management practices, arguing that “slaveholders dealt with complex challenges in sophisticated ways, often concurrent with and sometimes prior to managers in other settings” (8). Data practices “often thought of as quintessentially modern,” usually associated with the rise of Frederick Taylor’s system of scientific management in the early twentieth century, instead “coexisted with and even complemented slavery” (xiii). Far from simply offering a paean to capitalism’s achievements, however, Rosenthal is concerned with present as well as past ethical outcomes “when managers and owners encounter workers primarily as numbers . . . separated . . . by layers of hierarchy” (xii), and when profit and innovation accompany violence and inequality instead of raising living standards of workers as well as of business owners. Most business historians consider slavery an archaic, retrograde labor system incapable of innovation, and so they ignore it when chronicling advances in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century management practices. Rosenthal, in contrast, argues that innovative slaveholders were exceptional businesspeople who have been excluded from standard business histories solely because of the nature of their business. Slaveholders’ proclivity for “seeing humans as inputs of production seems to have stimulated management innovation in ways that were difficult in free factories plagued with turnover” (191). And historians of accounting have long used slaveholders’ failure to frequently balance their books or to calculate rates of profit as evidence for backward accounting practices. Rosenthal contends this is not necessarily evidence of poor management, since planters “concentrated their efforts on tracking data that was immediately useful” (133). Her provocative findings will be of interest not only to business, economic, and agricultural historians, but also to anyone interested in the history of slavery and in the development of modern capitalism.

Capitalism · Economics · Management · Neoclassical economics · Political science · Profit (economics) · Scientific management · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies