Caitlin Rosenthal is the author of the book Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (2018), which looks at the accounting methods of the Southern planters, some of which turn out to have been notably innovative. She finds, for instance, that the accounting practice of depreciation was one of their innovations. That is a method of allocating the cost of capital purchases like large machinery to annual income over several years. It can get complicated. But the basic idea is that a capital investment like machinery often has benefits spread over a period of years. And as the machinery is used, it also gets wear and tear that reduces its monetary value from what it was when it was purchased.
Slaveowners depreciated their capital invested in human beings, their slaves. As she explains in Why Management History Needs to Reckon with Slavery Harvard Business Review 11/13/2018:
... one of the key developments in the emergence of modern business is the idea that you should analyze your products to see exactly how much everything costs. And related to this is the analysis of depreciation – so thinking about how a large fixed cost like a railroad train might change in value over time, and how you should account for that.She discusses a different aspect of planter business methods in The perils of Big Data: How crunching numbers can lead to moral blunders Washington Post 02/18/2019:
In one of the most prominent accounting guides for planters, Thomas Affleck’s “Plantation Record and Account Book,” he gives advice on how to appreciate and depreciate enslaved people. For him, these are long-lived, complex, capital assets. They are human capital. He doesn’t call them that, but he gives instructions on how to account for their growth and value as they get older, as they learn new skills and how to account for their depreciation as they age or if they’re injured or even if they attempt to escape.
... depreciation is something that I’d gotten used to seeing as a sign of remarkable sophistication. It doesn’t show up in accounting textbooks until the late 19th century and here we are half a century earlier, and we have a Southern planter instructing people how to appreciate and depreciate enslaved people. So that means that he was well ahead of his time in a setting that I had gotten used to thinking about as being one that was relatively backwards, one that wasn’t sophisticated. [my emphasis]
Running a slave plantation involved lots of data carefully entered into paper spreadsheets and reports that were passed along to absentee owners in England. From the comfort of counting rooms, plantation owners could review this data without having to think too hard about the people it represented.This is also related to the historical issue of how much Southern slavery should be considered an integral part of American capitalism or viewed in some other way, e.g., an aristocratic holdover.
Some planters received standardized reports every month from their sugar plantations in Jamaica and Barbados. These careful records tracked the daily tasks of the hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people they enslaved, all with an eye to maximizing profits. The accounts monitored the output of plantations as well as the “increase” and “decrease” of laborers, slaveholders’ chilling economic shorthand for births and deaths.
When you understand the context of these records - high mortality, punishing slave labor, racialized violence - the records are horrifying. But without that context, they erase as much as they reveal. They look like antiquarian versions of Excel spreadsheets. And, absent a moral perspective, the productivity enabled by data-driven analysis could be seen not as a marker of degradation but of progress.
In To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice Boston Review 02/20/2018, Rosenthal talks about how our view of slavery and the kind of economy of which it was a part can have important effects on how we view political systems and human rights:
One place to begin is to describe the abolition of slavery not as a human-rights measure but as a form of market regulation. In the abstract, this shift makes sense: abolition not only stripped slaveholders of their property, it also restricted property rights. It prevented men and women from being sold (or selling themselves) into bondage. Abolition also outlawed certain kinds of transactions and, as a regulation of “bonds,” it restricted the right to contract.Her analysis there doesn't imply that slavery was not a human rights issue. She's just explaining how the market view is also important. As she notes in the Majority Report interview, the way that slavery was abolished during and after the Civil War was confiscation of property without compensation. This is also relevant to the discussion of reparations for slavery. Because - and here's accounting theory again! - it can also be understood as "giving" individual slaves something of value (their own bodies) rather than paying the planters the money value of the property emancipation took away from them.
Framing abolition as market regulation inverts conventional ideas about slavery and capitalism, particularly the assumption that free markets are fundamentally connected to other human freedoms. The shared modifier “free” elides vast differences between free markets and other kinds of freedoms: freedom to move, to speak, to assemble, to love. History suggests that these freedoms can both expand together and move in opposition to one another. In the Atlantic world, “free” trade in goods (and bodies) expanded even as millions of Africans lost control over their lives and labor. The relationship between free markets and other freedoms is not inevitable. [my emphasis]
I haven't seen this particular angle discussed in the reparations discussion, probably because I'm not familiar with that discussion in any great depth with the issues being discussed in connection with reparations. But I can't imagine it won't be taken up in the policy discussion and polemics. Opponents of reparations could argue that emancipation actually was a substantial form of reparations, while advocates could point to it as an important precedent for the reparations idea.
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