Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management

"I picked this book up by chance. It had been sent to me by a publisher and it was just one of those random things, because it’s not my field at all. I found it absolutely compelling. She’s a former management consultant who has gone to the management records of the big slave plantations in the West Indies and the American South. She realised that they started as quite small enterprises, but grew into very large enterprises over time. They professionalized management practice and recorded what they did. This professionalization, in fact, preceded and guided American manufacturing, which is where we normally think Taylorist approaches to management and standardization came from. So that in itself is quite interesting—that those techniques came out of this morally reprehensible set of businesses and then got adapted elsewhere in the economy. But the book is also really interesting because it speaks to my own interest in understanding what we measure in the economy: how what we think of as data, things that are given, are not natural objects at all, but categories constructed by social practice and power in a society. So take this idea of people as assets, as capital stock. In economics, everybody talks about ‘human capital.’ We think it’s very positive, because if you use the concept of an asset, you can think about investing in your own future. But it’s sobering to realize that actually, that concept was used in a very different context—a very disturbing one. She has a great line: Reckoning with the ways planters accounted for slavery should encourage us to rethink the kinds of data we record and how we use it. Quantitative records can help us see farther, but only if we remember what the numbers make visible and what they erase. I think that’s a very powerful statement. Yes, and children dying is depreciation. Just the level of detail is incredible—for example, that businesses that started selling record books with pre-printed pages so that you could keep better records. Originally, planters moved. But then, as the merger of the plantations happened and they grew, it became a professionalized business. There is also a lot of recent work looking at the implications of this for the development of the British financial markets, because many slave owners were British. The investments people made in the plantations helped expand and create the markets for financial instruments in the UK."