This reading added extensive knowledge to my understanding of the slave trade. Prior to reading chapter two of Rosenthal’s Accounting for Slavery, I did not understand the amount of meticulous records that were kept on the births and death of slaves working on Caribbean sugar plantations. My view was definitely similar to Alfred Chandler, the author of Strategy and Structure, who viewed the role of administration and administrative records as only playing a significant role in the sphere of industry. However, Rosenthal writes, “On these plantations, violence and control complemented organizational innovation.” (Rosenthal 13) Figure 1.1 in this chapter shows how the bookkeeper of a plantation recorded how many people were born each month, and it had the added totals on the bottom of the sheet. (Rosenthal 12) As plantation owners placed little value on an enslaved person’s life, it is surprising to see such an organized record. Figure 1.4 is a photograph of an extremely in depth record kept on the Dawkins Plantations. This chart includes skills, age and health of enslaved individuals (Rosenthal 21).
While reading the chapter and learning about the incredible rates of death among enslaved individuals, I found myself considering the question of, ‘why didn’t these plantation owners, invest a small amount of money into keeping their slaves alive.’ Rosenthal writes, “In the British Caribbean, some estimates suggest that as many as half of ‘New Negroes’ died within three years of arrival.” (Rosenthal 12) After seeing the extensive bookkeeping plantations owners had completed, it was clear to me that they were very interested in spending as little money as possible and making a large profit. It surely is cheaper to keep an enslaved person alive than purchase more enslaved individuals. I can’t help but wonder that if plantation owners spent a bit more money on things like proper food for those enslaved on their plantations or giving them some time off to rest, they could have kept these enslaved individuals alive for longer and ended up making a larger profit in the long run.
While reading this chapter, I learned, for the first time, about the different role slaves played on plantations aside from physical labor. Rosenthal writes, “Just as planters made use of elderly and inform slaves as supervisors, they also made use of children on this special gang devoted to lighter tasks.” (Rosenthal 34) This chapter also explores other roles a slave may have had including being a midwife or a healer. Learning about this aspect of varying roles on plantations adds a multidimensional perspective that is lacking from much of mainstream High School level education in America.
I’m glad you learned something from this reading, both about the (surprisingly?) meticulous records and account books kept by many slaveholders and about the various kinds of labor enslaved people performed. It sounds like you’ve read (or at least heard of?) Alfred Chandler, so what is the intervention Rosenthal is making by comparing plantation slavery to the “scientific management” he describes as key to the rise of the modern corporation?
As to your question about slave mortality, I think you’re right to focus on this tension. Slaveholders certainly had an economic incentive to keep their enslaved workers alive and relatively healthy, even if they cared little about them as human beings and even if they sometimes sought to cut costs by clothing and feeding them as cheaply as possible. In the case of West Indian sugar plantation slavery, however, the climate was so unhealthy and the labor so intensive that slave mortality rates were very high, so slaveholders had to keep importing slaves from Africa… in contrast to the U.S., where mortality rates were low enough that the enslaved population could naturally reproduce even after the cut-off of the slave trade in 1808.