The section about the business of accounting journals and those that profited from them in Caitlin Rosenthal’s Accounting for Slavery was particularly interesting.
The cotton industry in the 1840s-1850s was still going strong and plantation owners, in their need to increase efficiency and profits, looked towards accounting books to gather, organize, and compare data. The demand was there as Rosenthal described southern planters as having an obsession with data, testing out different strategies to get the most out of their slaves like incentive systems varying in complexities from threat of violence to payment systems.
While accounting books were already being made and used around this time, it was Thomas Affleck’s accounting books that the demand for such journals began to grow. Affleck greatly profited from publishing his Plantation Record and Account Book due to its complex but intuitive design. Affleck specifically designed it so that anyone with a simple understanding of mathematics could use it, advertising it as a way for plantation owners to delegate bookkeeping to other employees which allowed those owners more time for other business matters(Rosenthal, 88).
Even though his journals were among the most popular in the south, Affleck still had trouble maintaining such a business. For example, Affleck would publish his journal in different versions each aimed towards plantations of various sizes though most of the very big plantations had any use in them, even still using only some parts of it(Rosenthal, 92). There was also the problem of trying to find a printer company that would consistently print Affleck’s journal, Affleck needing to hire several to keep up with demand. Even still that wasn’t enough since Affleck would at times still not have any journals to sell(Rosenthal, 92). Rosenthal even states that saying that the journals sold well was only something Affleck said with calculations and sales hard to verify(Rosenthal, 91).
Maybe it’s because of my major in accounting that I took an interest in this small detail in the grand scheme of things. The fact there was a demand for such data collection I believe really showed how much this data mattered to plantation owners and how important was in their business.
Good write-up–I’m glad that you could take away something from the reading that relates to your interest and major. In terms of how it fits into Rosenthal’s narrative, however, the account books are hardly a “small detail”–the book is called Accounting for Slavery, after all. This raises one of the biggest potential criticisms of her work. If, as she admits and you detail in para 4, account books like Affleck’s were haphazardly used and not all that successful, let alone universal, doesn’t that undermine her argument for the rational, calculating nature of cotton plantations and their relationship to capitalism?