Rosenthal explores the various ways in which the New World slave labor economies coincided with - and contributed to the growth of - productivity management practices, laying the groundwork for Taylorism and its influence in operations management and industrial engineering that continues today. Partisans of all shades insist that the abolition of slavery meant radical severance - they resist arguments that find continuities, that insist, as William Faulkner puts it, the past is never really past.Ĭaitlin Rosenthal’s valuable work Accounting for Slavery asserts continuities, exploring strong connections between plantation management practices and the theory of “scientific management,” also known as “Taylorism” (after its creator Frederick Winslow Taylor). Everyone along the ideological divide has projected a self-protective divide in time. Despite the reassuring rhetoric from all sides, the end of slavery has been no different. In revolutions, everyone is compelled to invest in an imagined break with the past.

It also undercuts the ‘Lost Cause’ notion of an antebellum South gallantly resisting the march of the Northern nation of shopkeepers and pragmatic business management practices, a South too steeped in tradition and pageantry to recognize the death knell of its economically inferior (but allegedly “humanistic”) paternalism. The notion that coerced labor could be profitable also raises disturbing historical questions for example, it challenges Cold War faith in the values of polarized systems in the US and USSR.

In fact, it could be seen as not so much a logical step to the establishment of ‘free’ labor, but as an equivalent and competing viable system. And that suggests that slavery was never directly at economic odds with capitalism. Slavery was generally immensely profitable and admirably efficient. The dissatisfaction with those explanations is driven by an obvious discomfort among many scholars. Some analysts try to see the arrangement as a regressive hangover from the pre-modern era, or rationalize it as an intermediary state in the development of mercantilism. How we understand their interconnections reflects the ideological and psycho-social needs of the period. We have been, and continue to be, haunted by the relationship between slavery and capitalism in the early Atlantic world. Harvard University Press, 312 pages, $35.

In this valuable study, Caitlin Rosenthal isolates an assortment of business practices and technologies that reflect the sophistication of New World plantation economies - dispelling myths of their romantic crudeness.Īccounting for Slavery: Masters and Management by Caitlin Rosenthal.

Accounting for slavery