Caitlin Rosenthal: Books about slavery: cane and whip

In July 1865, Mississippi planter Eli Capell, out of necessity, entered into contracts with the labor force that had previously been his property and which he had previously been allowed to drive with the whip. But now they were freed and no longer his slaves. He and other southern plantation owners still wanted blacks to continue to toil from sunrise to sunset. The blacks had to put up with a lot. There was only one thing they no longer allowed to happen to them: When they were still slaves, the amount of cotton they picked was weighed several times a day. If they picked too little, they were threatened with a whip. If they picked too much, the work required of them was increased. The slave always approached the weighing with fear.

The US historian Caitlin Rosenthal examined the accounting of sugar cane and cotton plantations on the West Indian islands and in the southern states of her homeland and wrote the insightful book “Accounting for Slavery”. The original English edition was published in 2018. In 2022, the Berlin publisher Matthes & Seitz published a German edition financially supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. The translation was carried out by literary scholar and American scholar Jörg Theis, who admits that Rosenthal’s descriptions of the conditions often took his breath away.

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The Luxembourg Foundation recently hosted a video conference with Rosenthal and Marcus Rediker. The two historians joined online from the USA and were translated simultaneously. Rediker rummaged through archives for 30 years, and his book “The Slave Ship” is already 15 years old. But it was only last year that Association A published a German translation.

“The transatlantic slave trade is the greatest drama of the last 1,000 years,” says Rediker. “These people have descended into hell,” he says of the victims. This slave trade lasted 400 years, in which Spain, Portugal, Great Britain and the Netherlands were big players, but in which German states and Denmark, for example, also took part. 12.5 to 13 million Africans were crammed into ships and only 10 million reached Brazil, the United States or the Caribbean alive. The bodies were thrown into the ocean along the way. Including the people who lost their lives on the way to the African ports, the death toll comes to 5 million.

Even though research into this has been going on for 60 years, we are still learning new things, explains Rediker. If he were to write his book “The Slave Ship” today, he would devote more time than he did 15 years ago to the slave traders who resided far away in London and Amsterdam. Since his book was already very extensive, he once concentrated on the slaves and the sailors. However, the profiteers are an essential part of understanding the economic context.

“The numbers can represent the violence, but they can also obscure it,” Caitlin Rosenthal recognized. As she reveals in “Accounting for Slavery,” few slaves on the sugar cane plantations of the West Indies survived the brutal working and living conditions for more than a few years. Balance sheets were prepared on blank forms. There were also records of the torture – lashes and the extremely painful rubbing of salt into the wounds. In the early 19th century, British lawyer James Stephen, an opponent of slavery, used plantation records to calculate high mortality rates and expose the cruel abuses.

In the books that the southerner Thomas Affleck offered for accounting purposes, a list of the amount of cotton picked could not be missing. The plantation owners exchanged ideas in magazines about, among other things, what a slave was capable of. This is fatally reminiscent of the observations that the engineer and founder of ergonomics Frederick Winslow Taylor made in a steel factory in Philadelphia in the 1880s. His students followed workers with a stopwatch to determine the workload that could be accomplished. In 1911, Taylor published his “Principles of Scientific Management,” which no company ever applied in its pure form, as he himself admitted. The writing nevertheless made Taylor famous and had a major influence on the economy.

Also in 1911, the US Congress convened a special committee that heard workers, unionists and managers until the following year – including Taylor as an expert. As Caitlin Rosenthal reports, a foundry worker told the special committee that scientific management felt to him “as if it amounted to slavery.” When managers stand with a stopwatch over the worker who bends over – that is a lot for a man to endure. A machinists’ union official argued that the system “virtually turns men into slaves.” The special committee came to the conclusion that there are elements here that act like a slave driver’s whip.

Rosenthal comments: “Of course, the ticking of a stopwatch is entirely different from the crack of a whip – or the simultaneous use of a whip and a clock, as was the case on some plantations. Still, the analogy is insightful.”

The American Civil War between North and South between 1861 and 1865 was not fought for honor, as author Margret Mitchell, for example, would have you believe in her shockingly racist and deeply vicious novel “Gone with the Wind” (1936). The point was that four million slaves in the southern states together represented at least $3 billion in wealth that the planters were unwilling to give up at any price.

The Civil War ended with the freeing of the slaves – and the planters looked for alternatives. They did not want to negotiate with workers, but rather continued to exercise almost unlimited power over them. So they hired convicts or got Chinese people into bondage. They also tried to recruit frugal immigrants from Europe who they could have used as slaves. But they didn’t put up with that and preferred to move on to the factories of the North or the Wild West.

As a young woman, Caitlin Rosenthal worked for the consulting firm McKinsey for two years. She analyzed data from companies to develop winning strategies. “I was very lucky to be working there during an economic boom,” she reports. “So it was about hiring people, not firing them; To expand business areas and not to reduce costs. And yet I had a bad feeling about it.”

Accounting allows us to “distance oneself from misery,” says auditor Frank Fabel in his afterword. »This book is a healing shock. It’s sometimes as if our history of numbers obscures events rather than explains them.”

Caitlin Rosenthal: Accounting for Slavery. Matthes & Seitz, 411 pages, hardcover, €28;
Marcus Rediker: The slave ship. Association A, 480 pages, br., €24.

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