Online lecture – Accounting is a neutral technique, far away from history and politics? Not at all! In this session, we will make an excursion into our past. We will show how the history of accounting is intertwined with the history of colonialism:
Online lecture – Accounting is a neutral technique, far away from history and politics? Not at all! In this session, we will make an excursion into our past. We will show how the history of accounting is intertwined with the history of colonialism:
The first “asset” to be “depreciated” was not a locomotive or a steamboat but, let us say, a black boy-slave of five years. Slaves were leased or bought on credit; their price was negotiated on stock exchanges; their fertility found its way into business plans; used slaves were written off. “Scientific Management” did not originate in Ford’s assembly line but rather in commercial plantations. Measuring output in time-sheets is an invention, it seems, of the Jamaican or Haitian slave owners.
In “Capitalism: A Short History”, German historian Jürgen Kocka noted that: “Apparently, almost all the components of the financial apparatus we associate with capitalism were developed before the creation of factories and wage labor. … One must first get used to the irritating thought that the implementation of early modern capitalism outside of Europe was connected with the mass increase of unfree work.” (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016).
This “irritating thought” has received further support from the groundbreaking work by Caitlin Rosenthal, whose book Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Harvard University Press, 2018) made waves at Harvard Business School last autumn. We intend to explore this track further.