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So accounting turned the south of the US into “a vast laboratory for agricultural improvement”. Higher yields came about “because planters could calculate and enforce a faster rate of picking”. “Between 18, the average amount of cotton picked per slave per day increased about ­fourfold, or 2.3 percent per year.” This wasn’t due to new strains of cotton that were easier to pick. Rosenthal describes “a tremendous increase in productivity during the sixty years ­preceding the US Civil War”. One of these was “sogering” or ­“pretending to work, and accomplishing as little as possible”. Some “responded with subtle modes of resistance”. If they exceeded it, they would be expected to always pick this higher amount. If slaves later fell short of this amount, they faced ­punishment. The aim was to work out how much each slave could pick.

Some planters measured slaves’ progress three times a day and gave “small prizes” as incentives for them to pick more. Weston said, “In nothing does a good manager so much excel a bad one, as in being able to discern what a hand is capable of doing and in never attempting to make him do more.” Rosenthal says, “Systematic accounting practices thrived on plantations-not despite slavery but because of it.” Rosenthal says “more than half a century earlier” South Carolina planter Plowden CJ Weston had described his aims in “almost identical terms”. He aimed to “learn what really constituted a full day’s work for a first class man”. Like slave owners, Taylor thought workers spent too much time “in partial idleness, talking and half working, or actually doing nothing”. And they were doing so “according to Taylorian principles”. But according to management scholar Bill Cooke, at that time 38,000 plantation overseers “were managing four million slaves”.

It’s assumed that modern management emerged on US railroads in 1860. This holds that bosses can get more out of workers by close monitoring and efficient labour processes. These include production methods associated with industrial capitalism.įrederick Winslow Taylor is said to have founded the theory of “scientific management” during the 1880s and 1890s. Rosenthal argues that “by the end of the 18th century, practices on many ­plantations were becoming highly standardised”. The book looks in detail at plantation records and accounts from the Caribbean to the south of the US. But Rosenthal says accounting was also key.

Extreme violence helped a tiny minority maintain power.