Accounting for Control: Slavery, Quantitative Business Practices, and the American Corporation

Yield per acre, miles per day, price per pound, pounds per bale, proceeds per hand—today managers put numbers on almost everything. Ratios and totals enable businessmen to set targets, establish benchmarks, and make comparisons. Even intangibles like human capital are regularly expressed in numerical terms. But the metrics listed above are not just modern metrics. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, planter-capitalists used them to calculate the productivity of their slaves. In the Deep South and the West Indies, planters measured, monitored, and depreciated a very different kind of human capital with cruel precision. This paper explores quantitative practices on slave plantations, drawing on both manuscript records and planters’ manuals.

Where does plantation slavery fit in the history of corporations? For more than a century, historians have debated the nature of slavery in the American South. Was the plantation a “fundamentally ancient” mode of production? Or was it highly modern and strikingly capitalistic? A set of highly influential new books have emphasized the later, describing American slavery as a vigorous, violent economic order where efficiency and brutality went hand-in-hand. Among many others, Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (2013), Edward Baptist’s The Half that Has Never Been Told (2014), and Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2015), all describe aspects of a global commercial system driven by plantation slavery. Yet, despite this resurgence of interest in slavery and capitalism, we still lack an adequate business history of plantation slavery. This paper will begin to answer this need, exploring the plantation as a business form where planters and overseers faced complex management problems typically associated with the rise of large corporations in the late nineteenth-century.