ABSTRACT
In a recent series of papers, we have argued that accounting practice played a key role in sustaining slavery in the US and the British West Indies (BWI) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the US, it was instrumental in commodifying, objectifying and dehumanizing an entire class of people through practices such as valuing slaves and maintaining data on their daily whereabouts and productivity. The valuations are an interesting case in point. In both the US and the BWI, slaves were valued alongside livestock as economic commodities, obscuring their humanity and reinforcing the commonly expressed view of planters that slavery was essentially about business, not exploitation. Similarly, the popularization of a scientific approach to plantation accounting in the US in the 1850s, at a time when the continued existence of slavery was seriously under threat, suggests that accounting was used to legitimize the institution as a normal, scientific, business activity. The majority of plantations in the BWI were owned by absentee gentry in Britain for whom a regular flow of accounting data was necessary to control their agents in the Caribbean.
