Date/Time
Thursday
24 Sep 2015
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Location
470 Stephens Hall

Event Type
Colloquium

Caitlin C. Rosenthal
Assistant Professor of History; University of California, Berkeley

Beginning in the 1780s, slave plantations in the British Caribbean began to use elaborate pre-formatted accounting ledgers to monitor plantation activities. This talk will examine these forms, exploring their use in sugar and cotton production in the British West Indies and their eventual dissemination to the American South. These detailed records reflect planters’ attempts to translate their power as masters into power as managers. They performed an array of calculations, from labor productivity rates to the appreciation and depreciation of human capital, and their techniques foreshadow the rise of scientific management in the late nineteenth century.