caitlin rosenthal accounting for slavery

Some historians see this rise in absentee ownership as a sign of decline, but it is also among the first instances of the separation of ownership and management, Rosenthal says-a landmark in the history of capitalism. When wealthy slave owners in the West Indies started leaving others in charge of their plantations, she found, they asked for regular reports about how their businesses were faring. 'It's a much bigger, more powerful question to ask, If today we are using management techniques that were also used on slave plantations,' she says, 'how much more careful do we need to be? How much more do we need to think about our responsibility to people?' Absentee OwnershipĪccording to Rosenthal, the history of detailed record-keeping on plantations goes back to at least the 1750s in Jamaica and Barbados. Capitalism is not just about the free market it was also built on the backs of slaves who were literally the opposite of free.

But in reality, it's much messier than that. The evolution of modern management is usually associated with good old-fashioned intelligence and ingenuity-'a glorious parade of inventions that goes from textile looms to the computer,' Rosenthal says. The work is part of her current book project, 'From Slavery to Scientific Management: Capitalism and Control in America, 1754-1911,' and the forthcoming edited collection Slavery's Capitalism. On the contrary, she sees her research as a critique of capitalism-one that could broaden the understanding of today's business practices. She didn't want to be perceived as saying something positive about slavery. “How much more do we need to think about our responsibility to people?”Īs fascinating as her findings were, Rosenthal had some misgivings about their implications. Several of the slave owners' practices, such as incentivizing workers (in this case, to get them to pick more cotton) and depreciating their worth through the years, are widely used in business management today. Rosenthal, a Harvard-Newcomen Fellow in business history at Harvard Business School, found that southern plantation owners kept complex and meticulous records, measuring the productivity of their slaves and carefully monitoring their profits-often using even more sophisticated methods than manufacturers in the North.

But when she started researching account books from the mid-1800s, a period of major economic development during the rise of industrialization in the United States, Rosenthal stumbled across an unexpected source of innovation. She set out to tackle something much more mundane: the history of business practices.

Rosenthal didn't intend to write a book about slavery.

Caitlin rosenthal accounting for slavery