![]() ![]() Rosenthal’s research led to her to Thomas Affleck’s Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book, a workbook of blank standardized business forms published around 1848 and widely available to most plantation owners. ![]() “So, while Northern business owners were struggling to recruit and train new workers, plantation owners were speeding up labor and increasing output per person.” “Planters could lay out the grids of everyone working in their fields, and they could track how much cotton every single person was picking every day,” Rosenthal said. They owned their workers and were so determined to extract every ounce of the enslaved peoples’ available energy that they ended up developing models of business efficiency still used today. ![]() Southern plantation owners had no such problem. But Northern business owners had trouble maintaining a stable workforce, losing as much as 100 percent of their employees in a year, Rosenthal said. (Photo courtesy of Caitlin Rosenthal)īusiness owners in 19th century New England are rightly recognized for developing manufacturing efficiencies like factories and the cotton gin. Caitlin Rosenthal is an assistant professor of history at UC Berkeley. ![]()
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