Someone in the Kalahari Collected Crystals 105,000 Years Ago

Whilst contracts had previously been written by hand, the standardisation and scale of reproduction enabled by Gutenberg meant that risk could be transacted in open markets by complete strangers.

What printing did was enable capital markets and merchants to establish mercantile practices that could extend to an arbitrary N degrees of separation. That network expansion, more than any individual technological innovation, is responsible for the upscaling of all the enterprises which distinguish mass consumer society from any prior society.

The Atlantic slave trade was one important step on this journey.

This study [1] examines the accounts of the Portuguese New Christian trader, Manoel Batista Peres. These private accounts, found in the Archivo General de la Nación in Lima, Peru, were associated with the trading of slaves on the Upper Guinea Coast in the early seventeenth century. The accounts take the double-entry format but, in the absence of a metallic currency, were kept in cloth money. Combining evidence from the accounts themselves, with the context in which Peres conducted his business, the study explores the reasons why he kept his accounts in this format. It shows how this system of accounting could be adapted to a non-monetised economy and contributes to the debate over the relationship between double-entry bookkeeping and the rise of capitalism.

The number of slaves carried off from Africa to the Americas increased fivefold between 1630 and 1770 [2]

Based on extensive archival research, this study [3] documents and analyses the accounting techniques that the Companhia Geral do Grão Pará e Maranhão applied to its slave trading operations during the second half of the eighteenth century. The surviving accounting records of this Portuguese chartered company reveal – in meticulous detail – the integral role that accounting technology played in enabling the slave trade to flourish.

Slavery thrived under colonial rule. British and Dutch settlers relied on enslaved people to help establish farms and build the new towns and cities that would eventually become the United States. Enslaved people were brought to work on the cotton, sugar and tobacco plantations. The crops they grew were sent to Europe or to the northern colonies, to be turned into finished products. Those finished goods were used to fund trips to Africa to obtain more slaves who were then trafficked back to America. This triangular trading route was profitable for investors. To raise the money to start many future plantation owners turned to capital markets in London - selling debt that was used to purchase boats, goods and eventually people. [4]

The common narrative is that today’s modern management techniques were developed in the factories in England and the industrialized North of the United States, not the plantations of the Caribbean and the American South. According to a new book by historian Caitlin Rosenthal, that narrative is wrong. Rosenthal is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and in her new book, “Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management,” she looks at the business side of slavery once it was well-established on plantations. Rosenthal argues that slaveholders in the American South and Caribbean were using advanced management and accounting techniques long before their northern counterparts. Techniques that are still used by businesses today. [5]

[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/40698353?seq=1

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/103237321348593...

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/40984784?seq=1

[3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1032373217696512

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49476247

[5] https://www.marketplace.org/2018/08/14/disturbing-parallels-...