Monetising human life: slave valuations on US and British West Indian plantations

Richard K. Fleischman · David R. Oldroyd · Thomas N. Tyson

101 citations0/0 files storedAccounting History

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Accounting Theory and Financial Reporting Accounting and Organizational Management Colonialism, slavery, and trade

Abstract

This paper examines specifically a frequently employed purpose of accounting on slave plantations in the antebellum US and the pre-emancipation British West Indies (BWI) -the evaluation of slaves as assets. We attempt to explain why this exercise was undertaken and the processes involved. Slaves were paraded past plantation managers and overseers, often in the company of appraisers and bookkeepers, where narrow distinctions were made on the basis of qualitative information such as physical characteristics and productive efficiency. The paper considers certain comparative features between the two slave environments, such as the greater concern in the BWI with linking valuations to the skill sets of slaves and a valuation premium on male slaves in the US which did not exist in the Caribbean. The paper concludes with a consideration of certain moral issues of slavery, such as the potential implication of accounting and accountants in a repressive regime and the attribution of contemporary morality to an historical epoch long past.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 101 citations exist upstream.

References

1996Critical and interpretive histories: insights into accounting’s present and future through its past 1990Without consent or contract: the rise and fall of American slavery 2014Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave 1993The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938.1993The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 1991The overthrow of colonial slavery 1776–1848 1998ACCOUNTING IN THE SERVICE OF THE HOLOCAUST 1988The overthrow of colonial slavery, 1776-1848

Cited by

2016Critical accounting research in hyper-racial times 2007The culpability of accounting practice in promoting slavery in the British Empire and antebellum United States 2007The culpability of accounting in perpetuating the Holocaust 2011Plantation accounting and management practices in the US and the British West Indies at the end of their slavery eras1 2004Theoretical perspectives on accounting for labor on slave plantations of the USA and British West Indies

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.