Slavery Economics.

• Author: Carden, Art

Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management

By Caitlin Rosenthal

295 pp.; Harvard

University Press, 2018

University of California, Berkeley business historian Caitlin Rosenthal's Accounting for Slavery is a prominent contribution to the growing academic literature on the "New History of Capitalism," the often-critical analysis of race, gender and the power dynamics in capitalism. The book divides its attention between New History historians and their critics, and Rosenthal laudably tries to give each side a fair hearing. The book is not without its problems, but Accounting for Slavery represents an important contribution to our understanding of economic and business history. Remarkable for its brevity--only about 200 pages of tightly organized text--the book earns the high praise bestowed on it by one reviewer: "If a reader comes away from a history of accounting wishing it were longer, it is clear that the author did something extraordinary."

Rosenthal decisively refutes the late Harvard business historian Alfred Chandler's claim that 18th- and 19th-century plantation management was unscientific, unsystematic, and "pre-modern." We have known since the pioneering work of Alfred Conrad and John R. Meyer in the 1950s that slavery was profitable and viable, but Rosenthal makes it dear that plantations were sophisticated operations worthy of a place in the history of business and management. It is easy to see why her dissertation on which the book is based won the Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History from the Business History Conference and was a finalist for the Allan Nevins Prize in American Economic History from the Economic History Association.

Slavery and capitalism / A superficial understanding of the idea that plantations operated under many of the principles of modern business has proven irresistible for some commentators and interpreters: the notion that good business practices are rooted in brutal plantation slavery is just too good to pass up. This is even suggested by some of the promotional literature from Rosenthal's publisher, Harvard University Press.

She is explicit, though, that she is not claiming that plantation operations are the root of 20th- and 21st-century management. She writes:

This is not an origins story. I did not find a simple path where slaveholders' paper spreadsheets evolved into Microsoft Excel. The narrative that emerged was far more complicated: many businesspeople in different...