Why Management History Needs to Reckon with Slavery

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Harvard Business Review

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4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2018

⏱️ 25 minutes

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Summary

Caitlin Rosenthal, assistant professor of history at UC Berkeley, argues there are strong parallels between the accounting practices used by slaveholders and modern business practices. While we know slavery's economic impact on the United States, Rosenthal says we need to look closer at the details — down to accounting ledgers – to truly understand what abolitionists and slaves were up against, and how those practices still influence business and management today. She's the author of the book, "Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Kurt Nick is here from Ideacast. I want to tell you about the Big Take
0:05.1	podcast from Bloomberg News. Each weekday they bring you one important story
0:10.0	from their global newsroom like how AI will upend your life and why China's
0:15.4	targeting the US dollar. Check out the big take from Bloomberg wherever you
0:20.2	listen. Welcome to the HBRIDIA cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael.
0:43.0	Most accounts of U.S. business history start with the Industrial Revolution, the
0:53.8	railroads, New England factories. Slavery doesn't usually come into it. Our
0:59.2	guest today, Caitlin Rosenthal, says we need to take a much closer look at the part slavery has played in business and management.
1:07.0	In her research, she's found examples of modern management practices buried in the ledgers of plantation owners.
1:14.3	She says we won't really understand
1:16.3	what enslaved people were up against
1:18.6	until we reckon with how sophisticated
1:20.4	those management systems were.
1:22.4	And we can't have a full understanding of modern management. those management
1:24.2	unless we're willing to look deeper at some of the painful aspects of its history.
1:29.2	There's just huge numbers of books about famous entrepreneurs about steam engines and
1:34.4	railroads and computers about things where it's relatively easy to tell a
1:39.5	triumphant story and by contrast this makes people really really uncomfortable.
1:43.0	In some cases innovation and violence went together and built on each other and that's
1:47.8	totally contrary to most narrative as in innovation.
1:51.2	In Germany after the Holocaust and really up to today
1:54.9	there continued to be huge numbers of business histories grappling with these
	...

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