Slavery and the Law Conference Series 2020-2021
29 October 2020 - Accounting for Slavery. Mastery, Management and American Capitalism, with Professor Caitlin Rosenthal
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.
17 September 2020 - Lord Dalhousie Report on Slavery, with Professor Afua Cooper
For first instalment of the 2020-2021 “Slavery and the Law” series, Professor Afua Cooper (Dalhousie U) participated in a plenary class for the LAWG 220 Property / Les biens courses taught by Professors Tina Piper, Lionel Smith and Pierre-Emmanuel Moyse.
About the speaker
A faculty member of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of Dalhousie University, Professor Afua Cooper is the Chair of the Scholarly Panel on Lord Dalhousie's Relationship to Race and Slavery and co-author of the Report. She is also the former James Robinson Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies.
Her research interests are African Canadian studies, with specific regard to the period of enslavement and emancipation in 18th and 19th century Canada and the Black Atlantic; African-Nova Scotian history; political consciousness; community building and culture; slavery’s aftermath; Black youth studies.
