University of California, Berkeley business historian Caitlin Rosenthal’s Accounting for Slavery is a prominent contribution to the growing academic literature on the “New History of Capitalism,” the often-critical analysis of race, gender and the power dynamics in capitalism. The book divides its attention between New History historians and their critics, and Rosenthal laudably tries to give each side a fair hearing. The book is not without its problems, but Accounting for Slavery represents an important contribution to our understanding of economic and business history. Remarkable for its brevity—only about 200 pages of tightly organized text—the book earns the high praise bestowed on it by one reviewer: “If a reader comes away from a history of accounting wishing it were longer, it is clear that the author did something extraordinary.”

Rosenthal decisively refutes the late Harvard business historian Alfred Chandler’s claim that 18th- and 19th-century plantation management was unscientific, unsystematic, and “pre-modern.” We have known since the pioneering work of Alfred Conrad and John R. Meyer in the 1950s that slavery was profitable and viable, but Rosenthal makes it clear that plantations were sophisticated operations worthy of a place in the history of business and management. It is easy to see why her dissertation on which the book is based won the Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History from the Business History Conference and was a finalist for the Allan Nevins Prize in American Economic History from the Economic History Association.

Slavery and capitalism / A superficial understanding of the idea that plantations operated under many of the principles of modern business has proven irresistible for some commentators and interpreters: the notion that good business practices are rooted in brutal plantation slavery is just too good to pass up. This is even suggested by some of the promotional literature from Rosenthal’s publisher, Harvard University Press.

She is explicit, though, that she is not claiming that plantation operations are the root of 20th- and 21st-century management. She writes:

This is not an origins story. I did not find a simple path where slaveholders’ paper spreadsheets evolved into Microsoft Excel. The narrative that emerged was far more complicated: many businesspeople in different geographies were developing new data practices independently.

Her second sentence is especially important: even though at times she seems to want to tell a story about management with slavery front-and-center and even though some of her interpreters want to trace modern hourly workers’ time on the clock to American slaves’ Time on the Cross, she is identifying just one instantiation of the much larger move toward quantification. She claims, “Slavery was central to the emergence of” capitalism, which she goes on to define and discuss in a footnote later in the book. Slavery and “capitalism” were certainly evolving together, but I still think it is a mistake to put slavery anywhere close the center of the “emerging capitalism” narrative.

Slavery, after all, is ancient, and what was new in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries was the more widespread embrace of business and especially quantification. What Rosenthal identifies and explores is one way the new zeal for quantification—Bristol probate inventories show a switchover from Roman to the much-easier-to-use Arabic numerals in the 17th century—was combined with chattel slavery. There is a dark side to the history of innovation and measurement, both of which can be used for great evil as in the experiments by Mississippi plantation owner Francis Terry Leak or in the eugenics movement discussed in Princeton economic historian Thomas C. Leonard’s 2016 book Illiberal Reformers. While Rosenthal speculates about the possible relationship between plantation management and the “scientific management” movement by noting that Gantt chart inventor Henry Gantt was born into a slaveholding Maryland family in 1861, reviewer Paul Rhode points out that the most prominent advocate of scientific management, Frederick Winslow Taylor, was born to a family of abolitionists.

Economics and freedom / I am a little confused by Rosenthal’s periodic references to abolition and restrictions on slavery as “regulation.” That seems to obscure what most advocates of “capitalism” (myself included) would say is the defining characteristic of the system: that it relies on voluntary interaction. Hence, Rosenthal is exactly right that enthusiasts for free markets “assume that a free market does not include slavery.” She continues, though, that “the freedom to enslave was an economic freedom.… Viewed in this light, the abolition of slavery was a triumph of market regulation that restricted [planters’] economic freedoms even as it offered freedom to so many others.” Amelioration and abolition

can be thought of as waves of market regulation, a lens that casts planters and overseers as entrepreneurs playing at a game of regulatory arbitrage. Seeing abolition as a form of market regulation recognizes the ways it restricted slaveholders’ property rights: abolition prevented the sale of men and women and thus restricted the right to contract.

For one group, yes, but this seems like a cockeyed way to think about “market regulation” and “economic freedom.” Elsewhere in the book, we learn that “in Barbados, following a plot by enslaved Africans to overthrow their masters, planters sought to restrict access to literacy and Christianity,” and “the Barbados Slave Code of 1661 included a ‘ticketing clause to curtail runaways.’ ” It is well-known that slave schooling was sharply proscribed in the American South. There is a discussion of some of the postbellum Black Codes that were explicitly enacted in order to interfere with the labor market. Were these “market regulation” in the same way?

Getting it right / In his review of Rosenthal’s book, the economic historian Howard Bodenhorn writes

Economic historians, it is fair to say, are deeply skeptical of the new interpretation [of the relationship between slavery and capitalism], partly on ideological grounds, partly on methodological grounds, and partly because cliometricians are convinced that the new history sometimes gets the facts wrong. Caitlin Rosenthal’s Accounting for Slavery represents a valuable contribution in that it bridges the ideological and methodological divide. Rosenthal is clearly sympathetic to the new history of slavery, but she is also interested in getting the facts right and engaging with business and economic historians.

I heartily concur. Accounting for Slavery is a serious work of economic and business history that will, I suspect, become a standard addition to graduate and undergraduate reading lists in these fields.

Other reviewers have remarked that the book leaves a lot of important questions unanswered. Maybe Rosenthal would have gotten to them in Accounting for Slavery if she had decided to write a longer book. I hope she will take them up in later work, along with the students and scholars who find Accounting for Slavery on their syllabus.