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

In Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, Caitlin Rosenthal presents a compelling “business history of plantation slavery” (p. 8). Rosenthal argues that slavery created a special set of conditions that allowed for modern business management and organizational practices to take shape. Rather than representing slavery as a strain on capitalist enterprise, Rosenthal shows that the unfree labor on which the plantation system depended allowed for intensive tracking, managing, and increased production in ways that were particular to slavery. Slavery allowed for long-term supervision of the enslaved in ways not possible in wage-labor economies that experienced high turnover. This data could lead to innovation and increased productivity in ways typically associated with capitalist business management.

Rosenthal shows how the management of plantation systems in the West Indies and the United States mirrored advances that have been more closely followed in the field of traditional business history. She first reveals how eighteenth-century plantations in the West Indies were early models of the “multidivisional form” of organized and hierarchical production (p. 16). For Rosenthal, absentee ownership, particularly prevalent among English planters in the region, represented not so much decline but “a sign of sophistication and managerial complexity,” as a marker of separation between ownership and management (p. 43). Standardization and “paper technologies,” as Rosenthal describes them, allowed these accounting practices to circle the Anglo-Atlantic world (p. 63). Rosenthal excels at revealing how paper and people helped create standardized practices for the management of plantations. Preprinted forms in plantation ledger books made ideas travel well, as did young accountants with experience on the plantations.

In the second half of the book, Rosenthal shows how the enslaved provided both the labor and the capital that allowed these systems to flourish. With their record keeping, some enslavers followed the value, depreciation, and markets for enslaved people as capital. Rosenthal argues that enslaved people were never completely commodified by slavery’s market because they were never “fully fungible” (p. 149). While enslavers followed the changing value of their human property, in ways similar to other long-term investments of the period, profit was not always readily apparent in relation to costs. Recording the value of the enslaved did provide economic opportunity in the form of mortgages and loans, which could also lead to investment and greater profits. Yet only through loans and sales could the value of the enslaved as human capital be used.

What was often more important to enslavers was to improve methods to make the most efficient use of enslaved people’s labor. Productivity depended on early iterations of scientific management, agricultural advancements, and control of the enslaved. Rosenthal’s work with plantation account books shows that “power enabled precise management” (p. 86). Tracking the work of the enslaved could make for more efficient labor systems. Enslavers and managers recorded data and experimented with planting techniques, punishment, and sometimes reward to increase production. The enslaved, however, were people who could stand in the way of even the most impressive innovations.

As Rosenthal makes clear, each of these developments depended on power. This power was not absolute; the enslaved made themselves known as human beings rather than as perfectly willing parts of the plantation “as a kind of human machine” (p. 115). Yet the terror of slavery was routinized in ways that facilitated data collection and the implementation of new productivity schemes. In so many ways, technological advance depended on the enslaved and the violence enacted toward them. Rosenthal reminds readers throughout the book that even paperwork could enact its own chilling kind of brutality. These systems also depended on legal mechanisms that, of course, eventually changed. The capability of former enslavers to maintain such strict control over African Americans weakened during Reconstruction and through the Jim Crow era, but accounting as a mechanism of control remained and was used to the distinct disadvantage of those caught up in sharecropping, tenancy, and debt peonage.

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