Featuring Caitlin Rosenthal
Assistant Professor of History
UC Berkeley

During the 18th and 19th centuries, slaveholders in the American south and the Caribbean used early versions of some of the same data and accounting practices we now associate with the rise of big business. This talk will describe the development of these quantitative management practices, including the depreciation of enslaved lives, and the emergence analysis similar to what would later be called scientific management. Slaveholders subjected enslaved people to experiments, allocating and reallocating labor from crop to crop, planning meals and lodging, and carefully recording daily productivity. They used data to offer rewards and also to mete out brutal punishment. The records they left behind reveal both the violence of the system and the ways enslaved people pushed back against it. They also offer an opportunity to think through how we can craft more ethical data practices. 

Co-sponsored by DASH as part of the Human in the Data series.