![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() By including both a business history and a history of slavery, Accounting for Slavery "offers an opportunity to study the way businesses benefit from coercion and control" while also helping us to "better understand what the slaves were up against" (189). By tracking the daily lives of the men, women, and children they owned, plantation owners and those in their employ sought new ways to increase the efficiency of their practices and the profits they realized. Rosenthal argues that accounting was an essential part of the control that plantation owners exercised over the lives of enslaved people in the British West Indies and the antebellum American South. Fortunately, thanks to Rosenthal's crisp prose, sharp argumentation, and eye for the humane in the mundane, these concerns find little justification. While scholars whose dream afternoons involve unopened archival boxes might perk up at this description, other readers might wonder about the liveliness of a book about varieties of record keeping or worry that the lives of enslaved people would get lost in the numbers. ![]() Caitlin Rosenthal's Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management is a story of "rough, dirty pages," "bundling papers," and "loose documents" (29, 61). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |