The New York Times’ 1619 Project argues that American society was founded on slavery, and that the legacies of that brutal and racist system persist in almost every aspect of our lives today. An intellectual movement inspiring this project is the New History of Capitalism which argues that the Industrial Revolution was founded on the exploitation of African-Americans on antebellum U.S. cotton plantations. Prosperity and freedom for some came at the expense of deprivation and enslavement of others. An important contributor to this literature is Caitlin Rosenthal. Her new book investigates labor management practices on sugar plantations in the British Caribbean and cotton plantations in the American South and traces their legacies for modern capitalism.

Rosenthal successfully challenges Alfred D. Chandler’s assertation that slave plantations employed such an “ancient” form of organization that modern business historians can ignore their managerial practices. It is true that antebellum U.S. cotton planters rarely used the corporate form or the electric telegraph in their business operations. But they were active profit seekers and often kept voluminous accounts documenting both the economic vitality and great cruelty of the slave system. Rosenthal is right that this history must be fully explored. She is less successful, in my view, in directly linking plantation practices to the later scientific management movement.

Accounting for Slavery begins by examining financial documents detailing the complex operations and management structures of sugar plantations in the British Caribbean. She creatively uses slave inventories to devise the organization chart for what she conceives as a multi-divisional firm. Rosenthal then turns to analyze how the plantation overseers on the islands communicated with absentee owners about daily activities through a flow of standardized reports.

The core of Accounting for Slavery is the study of productivity analysis conducted by antebellum U.S. cotton planters. Rosenthal pays special attention to the use of printed account books, such as the cotton books sold by Thomas Affleck after 1847. Plantation managers, according to Rosenthal, used these formalized records to gauge the maximum labor that workers could sustainably perform. This maximum was then used to establish work expectations, impose punishments, and plan future production. She argues their methods and goals were akin to what Frederick Taylor and the scientific management movement later sought to do. An important complication is that agriculture is more affected than manufacturing by the weather; what a farm worker could do depended significantly on factors outside one’s control and varied day by day.

Rosenthal further documents the efforts of southern planters to commodify their slave properties. These efforts included rating workers (as full, half, and quarter hands) and keeping detailed inventories that marked their human property to market values. Here Rosenthal reports the fascinating discovery that not only did slave owners apply sophisticated depreciation procedures, but some assigned negative values to specific individuals. Rosenthal also unearths new evidence of newspaper price currents and slave merchant communiques listing the going prices for slaves of standardized grades, much as grain was traded on the Chicago commodity exchanges. There is no sign, however, that actual transactions occurred at these prices. The predominant way to reveal asset value remained the slave auction, an inhumane system that reflected the difficulties of commodifying individuals.

Rosenthal’s analysis is largely “of” the accounts without being “in” the accounts. She makes no attempt to calculate rates of exploitation or profitability, or to check whether the numbers added up. Even on its own terms, the analysis leaves important questions open: who used the books; how well did the printed product capture what the planters cared about; what parts were actually filled out. The Affleck book had no forms to record field rotations or yields per acre. When reading the records, the brutality of the slave system comes through in the daily entries but the Affleck book provided no form to record punishments.

Accounting for Slavery’s final chapter examines how record keeping changed with emancipation and how newly freed women and men resisted being measured and monitored as they were under slavery. Here Rosenthal errs, by claiming that daily picking records “disappeared” in post-bellum period. New types of accounting, of days of work lost, of the value of provisions, and of the cotton taken to the gin, did become common immediately after the Civil War. But many cotton growers continued to record daily picking and new printed account books were issued. Picking on piece rates emerged as a common practice over the post-bellum period and growers recorded daily output for payment purposes. Incentives changed, but record-keeping continued. Making a systematic study of accounting practices on post-bellum cotton plantations—of production, labor turnover, provisioning, and indebtedness—is an open task for future scholarship.

In the book’s post-script, Rosenthal seeks to establish direct lines of influence from the plantation practices to the progressive-era scientific management movement. She notes that movement member Henry Gantt, originator of the Gantt chart, was born (in 1861) to a Maryland family of slave-owning tobacco planters. It is worth adding that Frederick Taylor, the movement’s overarching leader, was born five years earlier to a Pennsylvania family of ardent abolitionists. The plantation account books, which document the operation and brutality of the slave system, are of interest whether or not plantation practices directly influenced later labor management techniques. Rosenthal successfully refutes Chandler’s claim that business historians can ignore them. There is much to be learned from Accounting for Slavery and much left for economic historians to think about and debate.