Blog Post #2 (Rosenthal)

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.