![]() ![]() “Examine how slavery laid the foundation of American capitalism, including the invention of financial instruments, such as bonds that used enslaved people as collateral. Techniques that are still used by businesses today. According to a new book by historian Caitlin Rosenthal, that narrative is wrong… Rosenthal argues that slaveholders in the American South and Caribbean were using advanced management and accounting techniques long before their northern counterparts. The common narrative is that today’s modern management techniques were developed in the factories in England and the industrialized North of the United States, not the plantations of the Caribbean and the American South. ![]() ![]() Much of the research around the business history of slavery focuses on the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the business interests that fueled it. A morally reprehensible-and very profitable business. “Slavery in the United States was a business. ” -Matthew Desmond, New York Times Magazine “When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps… Management techniques used by 19th-century corporations were implemented during the previous century by plantation owners. ![]()
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