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

Accounting for Slavery offers a nuanced and meticulously researched analysis of management practices on West Indian and southern U.S. plantations. While historians have explained slavery's centrality to American economic development by examining relationships between the plantation complex and financial capital, northern industrialization, and global commodities markets, Rosenthal looks at the books. Through a close reading of plantation accounts and by finding parallels between plantations and later nineteenth-century corporations, she argues that slaveholders were early practitioners of scientific management.

Rosenthal organizes her account chronologically and thematically around four business practices: managerial hierarchies, standardized reporting, productivity analysis, and capital valuation. This structure offers an overview of plantation management from the eighteenth century through Reconstruction. She begins with eighteenth-century West Indian sugar plantations, where absentee slave owners developed managerial structures to supervise production from afar. This system of vertical reporting resembled those found in late nineteenth-century multidivisional corporations, with free white overseers and attorneys managing white bookkeepers, and enslaved drivers responsible for supervising gangs of enslaved workers in sugar fields, boiling houses, and livestock pens. As each layer of management generated comprehensive records, absentee owners could compare productivity across plantations and re-allocate enslaved workers between tasks. Complex organizational hierarchies and the reports that sustained them became tools for maximizing profit and technologies of control.

Next, Rosenthal moves to the antebellum U.S. South, where books like Thomas Affleck's Plantation Record and Account Book brought productivity analysis and capital valuation to cotton and sugar plantations. With Affleck's pre-printed forms, untrained overseers and slaveholders alike could adopt systematic accounting practices and quantify people into units of labor. Planters recorded the amount of cotton individuals picked and the bonuses and punishments overseers meted out. Account books also combined with published price lists to create standardized units like the "prime hand." Moreover, when they created standards that took into account biometric information that enslaved people could not alter, slave owners created a powerful tool for qualifying enslaved people's attempts to alter their own economic value.

Rosenthal throws the totality of these complex systems of surveillance and the advantages of legal control of workers into stark relief by comparing West Indian plantation management practices with those in northern U.S. factories. Contrary to arguments that slavery stalled innovations in business practices, she argues that the "managerial advantages of slavery" (7)—slave owners' control over enslaved people's lives and labor—guaranteed them the consistent workforce that would facilitate data-driven managerial practices. Slave owners tracked who worked where and how much they produced and then used these numbers to map out experiments with new labor allocations and crop varieties year after year. Conversely, high turnover made it difficult for northern factory owners who employed free workers to test new labor techniques or plan ahead. Rosenthal's final chapter on Reconstruction finds former slaveholders were also unable to focus singularly on maximizing efficiency when forced to negotiate with free people. They turned to other forms of legal and economic coercion to reconstruct some of the power they exercised before the Civil War.

The book's framing of violence and quantification as two halves of a single system of control is its greatest strength. Although Rosenthal remains focused on slaveholders' quantitative and managerial techniques, this is not a bloodless story. Numbers and violence went hand in hand, and "the soft power of quantification supplemented the driving force of the whip" (2). This insight allows Rosenthal to intervene in one of the most contentious debates in the history of slavery and capitalism: how to explain the explosion of cotton production in the antebellum South. While historians of capitalism have pointed to slaveholders' use of the "pushing system" to force enslaved people to pick more cotton, and economic historians have attributed the increase to higher-yielding cotton varieties, Rosenthal's nuanced account suggests these arguments are not mutually exclusive.¹ Slavery...