Author: ALEXANDER YOSHIZUKA-PANIJEL

Wealth and Power in the Early Republic by Mandell discusses the tumultuous timeline of America’s socioeconomic and political development. The timeline begins from 1783, America’s Independence from Great Britain, discussing essentially from scratch, with blueprints from Great Britain, Jubilee, and Agrarian laws, the prospect and direction the country is to take. Philosophical arguments among intellectuals are rampant, disseminated through pamphlets and newspapers, on America’s future regarding property, education, wealth, government, and thus reins of power.

Mandell expounds on the building axioms of America beginning with aristocracy and nobility inheritance. To curtail the hoarding and perpetual control of wealth and power through noble bloodlines, a “natural aristocracy” is proposed to distribute wealth and power to individuals with talent rather than inheritance. This postulate, at the time America was scraping together the frameworks of civilization, was much too idealistic. Though the wealth and power did go to individuals with talent and higher education: merchants, lawyers, and financial speculators, the same outcome was fated as that of the old world. A concentration of wealth and power to a select few, perpetuated by legal cunnings, however, did not at all result in the acquiescence of the people. It provoked wide criticisms and debates, though seldom amounting to anything, became the slow and arduous process of building a democratic republic.

In conclusion, the nascent nation of the New World, America, lacked a conducive dilution necessary for hasty development. Resources, population, institutions, and settlements were few, and so, it was noticeable to its citizens from even a cursory survey of the undertakings of the elite class. Communities were still small and intertwined, making the affluent elite stand out and be on grounds for much scrutiny, speculation, and thus censure. Diffusion of information needed spread only so far, and the elites would use rudimentary forms of propaganda and barriers of entry to remain in a position of power. Compared to today, where it is much too sophisticated and established for proper scrutiny, has set a course for the tremendous growth we see in contemporary America. Of course, the difference in scale is tremendous and so are the repercussions. This lack of hastiness allowed somewhat for an ideal environment for the deliberations regarding the building and forming of a nation.

Accounting for Slavery by Rosenthal delves into the rudimentary accounting practices to “sophisticated scientific management” between the periods of early adoption of slavery to the abolition era. Rosenthal pedantically details the development of accounting practices from antebellum era plantations throughout the Americas, where hierarchies of white workers would detail minute aspects of workers, essentially diminishing them as “cogs in a machine”, to the postbellum era where the sole object was to curtail any form of negotiation that would hinder profits and low costs.

Rosenthal’s main argument for the development of accounting practices during the antebellum period is that slaves were regarded as a form of sophisticated capital machinery. Unlike the machinery that was operated in the industrial heavy north, the slaves were monitored in intrusive detail based on age, sex, strengths, punishments, and output in various conditions and aspects. The minutia of control lead plantation owners, attorneys, and overseers to finely tune their slaves that inadvertently, as a byproduct of profit-seeking, cost-cutting, and output increasing, lead the development of accounting and management practices and technology to aid this process. However, the sophistication of this “scientific management” came down to debased ploys on manipulating lives through misleading incentives and harrowing punishments which persisted in the postbellum era but in more subtle and legal means. Rosenthal also argues that the abolition of slaves purveyed new methods in scientific management to further assert control on slaves. Though never reaching the level of output during the antebellum period, postbellum scientific management shows various ploys in the legal system to curtail runaways, signing misleading contracts that resembled indentured servitude of virtually no remuneration, binding slaves to the plantation at length, and inhibiting prospects of owning or renting land.

The accounting practices in the north, in contrast to the south, were haphazard and not as conducive to higher output, and thus profit, as workers were prone to quitting and demanding higher wages and lower hours. This shows by contrast to the industrial north where human capital could not be manipulated as easily and had to be negotiated with. In conclusion, Rosenthal’s arguments elucidate a blood-stained development of the accounting and management practices that serves as the basis of our modern corporations.