In the second instalment of the 2020-2021 “Slavery and the Law” series, Professor Caitlin Rosenthal gave a guest lecture in Professor Ignacio Cofone's Business Associations class. Caitlin Rosenthal's book, Accounting for Slavery. Mastery, Management and American Capitalism (Harvard University Press, 2018), is a unique contribution to the decades-long effort to understand New World slavery’s complex relationship with capitalism. Through careful analysis of plantation records, Caitlin Rosenthal explores the development of quantitative management practices on West Indian and Southern plantations. She shows how planter-capitalists built sophisticated organizational structures and even practiced an early form of scientific management. They subjected enslaved people to experiments, such as allocating and reallocating labour from crop to crop, planning meals and lodging, and carefully recording daily productivity. The incentive strategies they crafted offered rewards, but also threatened brutal punishment.
About the speaker
Caitlin C. Rosenthal is an associate professor in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the development of management practices, especially those based on data analysis. Methodologically, she seeks to blend qualitative and quantitative methods and to combine insights from business history, economic history, and labour history.
Teaching Slavery and the Law at McGill
To learn more about the initiative that started it all, please consult the "Digging Deeper" column on our "Courses" page. We also invite you to read Professor Adelle Blackett's reflections on teaching Critical Race Theory and Slavery and the Law at McGill University's Faculty of Law.
