A Five Books Best Economics Book of the Year
A Politico Great Weekend Read
"Absolutely compelling."
-Diane Coyle
"The evolution of modern management is usually associated with good old-fashioned intelligence and ingenuity But capitalism is not just about the free market; it was also built on the backs of slaves."
-Forbes
The story of modern management generally looks to the factories of England and New England for its genesis. But after scouring through old accounting books, Caitlin Rosenthal discovered that Southern planter-capitalists practiced an early form of scientific management. They took meticulous notes, carefully recording daily profits and productivity, and subjected their slaves to experiments and incentive strategies comprised of rewards and brutal punishment. Challenging the traditional depiction of slavery as a barrier to innovation, Accounting for Slavery shows how elite planters turned their power over enslaved people into a productivity advantage. The result is a groundbreaking investigation of business practices in Southern and West Indian plantations and an essential contribution to our understanding of slavery's relationship with capitalism.
"Slavery in the United States was a business. A morally reprehensible-and very profitable business Rosenthal argues that slaveholders were using advanced management and accounting techniques long before their northern counterparts. Techniques that are still used by businesses today."
-Marketplace (American Public Media)
"Rosenthal pored over hundreds of account books from U.S. and West Indian plantations She found that their owners employed advanced accounting and management tools, including depreciation and standardized efficiency metrics."
-Harvard Business Review
A Five Books Best Economics Book of the Year
A Politico Great Weekend Read
"Absolutely compelling."
-Diane Coyle
"The evolution of modern management is usually associated with good old-fashioned intelligence and ingenuity But capitalism is not just about the free market; it was also built on the backs of slaves."
-Forbes
The story of modern management generally looks to the factories of England and New England for its genesis. But after scouring through old accounting books, Caitlin Rosenthal discovered that Southern planter-capitalists practiced an early form of scientific management. They took meticulous notes, carefully recording daily profits and productivity, and subjected their slaves to experiments and incentive strategies comprised of rewards and brutal punishment. Challenging the traditional depiction of slavery as a barrier to innovation, Accounting for Slavery shows how elite planters turned their power over enslaved people into a productivity advantage. The result is a groundbreaking investigation of business practices in Southern and West Indian plantations and an essential contribution to our understanding of slavery's relationship with capitalism.
"Slavery in the United States was a business. A morally reprehensible-and very profitable business Rosenthal argues that slaveholders were using advanced management and accounting techniques long before their northern counterparts. Techniques that are still used by businesses today."
-Marketplace (American Public Media)
"Rosenthal pored over hundreds of account books from U.S. and West Indian plantations She found that their owners employed advanced accounting and management tools, including depreciation and standardized efficiency metrics."
-Harvard Business Review
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.
Examine[s] how slavery laid the foundation of American capitalism,
including the invention of financial instruments, such as bonds
that used enslaved people as collateral.
*New York Times*
Slavery in the United States was a business. A morally
reprehensible—and very profitable business. Much of the research
around the business history of slavery focuses on the horrors of
the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the business interests that
fueled it. The common narrative is that today’s modern management
techniques were developed in the factories in England and the
industrialized North of the United States, not the plantations of
the Caribbean and the American South. According to a new book by
historian Caitlin Rosenthal, that narrative is wrong… 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*
Absolutely compelling.
*Five Books*
[This] history of the accounting and management of slave
plantations in the Americas goes a long way towards puncturing
common-sense narratives of free market economics.
*Times Higher Education*
Valuable…Rosenthal proves that precise calculation of labor
productivity took root in the slave economy. The irony is that it
was more aggressively calculated there than among many Northern
manufacturers of the time.
*Arts Fuse*
Looks at how sugar and cotton plantations organised and tracked
production. It is a fascinating yet horrifying history of how
planters saw the slaves they profited from—and how they drove up
production…Challenges many dominant ideas about capitalism, class
and progress.
*Socialist Worker*
Full of insights into the history of Atlantic slavery, Accounting
for Slavery will force its readers to look with fresh eyes at the
many freedoms and unfreedoms of the modern American workplace. This
is an original book, which uniquely draws from and speaks to many
disciplines, while written compellingly for a wide audience.
*Jonathan Levy, University of Chicago*
By paying close attention to slaveholders’ methods of keeping
accounts, Caitlin Rosenthal shows how and why they tried to reduce
human beings to marks on a ledger. Anyone concerned with the
sometimes dark history of management, data, and modern accounting
practices needs to read this brilliant, carefully argued book.
*W. Caleb McDaniel, Rice University*
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