The Economics of African American Slavery: The Cliometrics Debate

Sutch, Richard

doi:10.3386/w25197

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 38 publications

(50 reference statements)

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“…7 Racism and a desire for dominance played important factors. As Sutch (2018) notes, in the U.S. 'No whites were slaves and the presumptive status of every black person was slave.' Similarly, in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, slavery was only imposed on Native Americans and Blacks.…”

Section: Justifying Slaverymentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Money does not stink’ – Accounting and slavery

Tinkelman

2024

Accounting History

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This article supplements the multidisciplinary effort sparked by the New York Times's 1619 Project to focus attention on institutions and practices that supported American slavery. Managerial and financial accounting practices support many types of endeavours. Accounting is usually done for managers, investors, and creditors. Accounting practices supported investment in, and management of slavery, a fundamentally immoral and destructive practice. Accounting served the interests of the enslavers, not the enslaved. Accounting practices helped investors in slave voyages and absentee plantation owners overcome agency problems, facilitating investment. Plantations used accounting to track enslaved people's productivity. Accounting terms and reports dehumanised enslaved men and women, classifying them as assets and as loan collateral. Accounting forms and statements treated slave ownership and the use of slave labour as routine. In these ways, accounting statements helped normalise and legitimise the practice of slavery and helped distance investors and lenders from its brutal reality.

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Section: Justifying Slaverymentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Money does not stink’ – Accounting and slavery

Tinkelman

2024

Accounting History

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“…14 The profitability of various slave plantations in the United States (primarily growing cotton as well as some commodities not grown extensively on Caribbean plantations) during the nineteenth century might have been somewhat lower: estimates suggest a return on investment of about 6-8% per year. 15 The profits on the American plantations were an outcome not only of the productivity of the plantations, where the masters had found ways to exploit slaves to maximize their own profits, but also of the political-economic environment in which these plantations were operating. Past research has argued that British sugar planters in the Caribbean benefited greatly from Britain's protectionist trade policies.…”

Section: Profits In the Value-chains Of The Slavery Plantation Complexmentioning

confidence: 99%

Governance, value-added and rents in plantation slavery-based value-chains

Rönnbäck¹

2021

Slavery & Abolition

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This article studies how the governance of a colonial valuechain impacted upon the value-added created. The article focuses on the value-chain of colonial sugar produced in the slave plantation complex in the Americas. Previous research has suggested that British planters in the Caribbean were able to reap high profits because of a protected market for sugar in Britain. In this paper, it is argued that it was mainly British refiners that were able to profit from these protectionist policies. Wholesale prices of muscovado sugar are shown to have been more or less on a par with those prevalent under free-market conditions, whereas the price of refined sugar was considerably higher in Britain than it presumably would have been in a freemarket. Limited competition and active collusion between refiners seem to have increased the markup on the refined sugar relative to the price of muscovado in Britain. Focusing only on the profitability on certain links in valuechains associated with the slave plantation complex in the Americas (most importantly the slave trade) might detract attention from how the governance structure of the valuechains allowed profits to be reaped elsewhere in the same value-chains.

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“…Thus in spite of their otherwise sharply opposed views on the economics of slavery, both Phillips and Lewis Gray referred to the antebellum plantation system as "capitalistic" (Phillips 1910, 39;Gray 1933). 7 Good summaries of this debate include Aitken (1971), David et al (1976) and Sutch (2018). 19 The two debates might better be viewed as conceptual vs. empirical approaches to the question of the relationship between capitalism and slavery in each of which the term "capitalism" stands in for a different object.…”

Section: Measuring Slave Exploitation Ratesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Good summaries of this debate includeAitken (1971),David et al (1976) andSutch (2018).8 This was a point for which Williams was criticized by his Marxist mentor C. L. R. James who argued that Caribbean sugar…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Theory of Capitalist Slavery

Clegg¹

2020

J Historical Sociology

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The relationship between slavery and capitalism has become a renewed topic of debate, yet scholars have not been able to agree on a definition of capitalism. In this article I first clear up some misconceptions and situate the debate in the Marxian tradition from which it arose. I argue that while non‐Marxian accounts of capitalism fail to explain the key social transformations that have accompanied the rise of capitalism globally, Marxian accounts have failed to comprehend similar transformations that occurred on American slave plantations in the 19th century. I then present a general model of capitalism, building on earlier work by Brenner and Wood, that both incorporates and explains the distinctive dynamics of capitalist slavery in the antebellum South.

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The Economics of African American Slavery: The Cliometrics Debate

Cited by 8 publications

References 38 publications

‘Money does not stink’ – Accounting and slavery

‘Money does not stink’ – Accounting and slavery

Governance, value-added and rents in plantation slavery-based value-chains

A Theory of Capitalist Slavery

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