In the鈥�second instalment鈥痮f the 2020-2021 鈥淪lavery and the Law鈥� series, Professor Caitlin Rosenthal gave a guest lecture in Professor Ignacio Cofone's Business Associations class. Caitlin Rosenthal's book,鈥疉ccounting for Slavery. Mastery, Management and American Capitalism鈥�(Harvard University Press, 2018), is a unique contribution to the decades-long effort to understand New World slavery鈥檚 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.聽
About the speaker聽
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.聽
Teaching Slavery and the Law at 91社区鈥�
To learn more about the initiative that started it all, please consult the "Digging Deeper" column on our "" page. We also invite you to read鈥�痮n teaching Critical Race Theory and Slavery and the Law at 91社区's Faculty of Law.鈥�
