Racist spreadsheets: How Southern plantations shaped modern business practices

A facet of chattel slavery horrors that many (including myself) don’t often consider is the cruelly efficient and influential business genius of Southern plantation owners in the 19th century.

A review of plantation account books reveals to us a level of sophistication in accounting that pre-dates the progression of Northern state titans of industry business practices. In fact, modern-day businesses are still using the frameworks and calculations plantation owners used for measuring productivity, optimizing the workforce and asset depreciation.

Let's get uncomfortable and learn more.

So, really, how did plantation business practices flow into modern-day office life?

With the rapid growth of the cotton industry and other commodity crops in the South, business practices on plantations needed to change to address the additional complexities and challenges of scale. To tackle this challenge, they developed various methods to track production, labor and resources that served as the foundation for many modern office practices.

“Slavery as an economic system was successful because it was highly organized, and this organization required extensive record-keeping and management structures. These structures, in turn, laid the groundwork for many of the administrative systems that we take for granted in the modern workplace.”

— Sven Beckert from "Empire of Cotton: A Global History"

To be clear, economic enterprises built on the extraction of labor from enslaved peoples is not solely an American concept but it is the history that lived in my backyard and is what I am choosing to focus in on here.

Ever wonder what a "spread sheet" is?

Picture a business so complex that existing accounting best practices simply couldn't handle the data. Before there was Excel or Google Docs, creative businessmen (like Thomas Affleck) in the South developed much larger bound sheets of paper so massive that they literally spread across their desks.

With a system of columns and rows for orderly data collection, these accounts books are the luddite precursors to what we use today. Old accounting ledgers were manually maintained, requiring accountants to record transactions, balances, and financial data by hand, which made it time-consuming and prone to errors.

In contrast, the updated spreadsheet accounting ledgers streamlined the process by organizing data in tabular formats, allowing for easier analysis and more efficient management of financial records. These innovations, which laid the groundwork for modern spreadsheets, improved accuracy, facilitated calculations and enabled better decision-making in business operations.

Where did the Gantt chart come from?

While Gantt charts are widely used in modern project management, the concept of visualizing schedules and resources can be traced back to plantation accounting practices, where clear organization and planning were necessary for coordinating large-scale operations.

Henry L. Gantt, the creator of the Gantt chart, came from a family with a history of slaveholding in Maryland. This connection to the plantation economy provides an important context for understanding the development of Gantt charts and their historical roots in the management practices of a racially exploitative system. My Gantt thoughts are admittedly surface-level in this post, but if you find this interesting this article is pretty incredible if you want to go deeper into Henry’s philosophy and limitations.

Productivity analysis needs its own analysis

Productivity analysis is the practice of measuring and analyzing the efficiency of workers in order to increase productivity and profits. While this practice is commonly used in modern workplaces, it too has roots in the racist practices of slavery.

As Rosenthal shares in her book "Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management," productivity analysis on plantations was similar to scientific management, which emerged in the early twentieth century. This approach involved breaking down tasks into smaller components and measuring the time it took workers to complete each component. This allowed plantation owners to identify areas where productivity could be improved and to incentivize workers to work faster.

Today, productivity analysis is still used in many workplaces, but it often perpetuates racial inequalities. For example, studies have shown that Black workers are often subjected to higher levels of scrutiny and surveillance than their white counterparts, leading to increased stress and lower job satisfaction. Additionally, productivity metrics can be biased against certain groups of workers who may face systemic barriers such as discrimination or lack of access to resources.

As a result, it is important for businesses to critically examine their use of productivity analysis and ensure that it is not perpetuating racial inequalities or other forms of discrimination.

The separation of enslavers from the humanity behind their data mirrors today's modern executive

The separation of plantation owners from the humanity of the enslaved people represented in their data is a cautionary tale for us all. In the 19th century, enslaved peoples’ lives were tucked away in spreadsheet boxes — disposable pawns to be used for the whims and profits of its stakeholders.

As business professionals today, we are more immersed in data than ever before with even greater pressures for profitability and growth. But we cannot separate ourselves from the source and true meaning of the data on business spreadsheets.

Humans should never be relegated to faceless marks in a ledger - this goes for the human-centric data points that we track today too.

Workers are not commodities, full stop

Acknowledging the connection between innovation, the relentless pursuit of money and the role that extreme inequality and violence plays in both is important in understanding how our world works today -- and how we want things to work in the future.

Does pointing to advancements that occurred during truly particularly brutal periods of history or by power-hungry, dangerous men negate the value of some of the contributions that keep our society running today? Yes and no.

As a wildly imperfect human myself, I'm clearly not expecting sainthood here, but I'm also unwilling to go along with the "product of their times" argument when it comes to incorporating foundational ideas and processes in the modern world I inhabit. When we look more carefully at the tools and methodologies we build our working lives around, I want us to feel free of the burden that "this is just how business is done."

“We are the pilots of our own destiny, we decide how business is done and how we take care of the humans that help make that business happen. ”

— Me

While spreadsheets, Gantt charts and seeking a profitable company to support the systems that pay my wages won't be going anywhere in my professional life, I encourage us all to push back on anything that is less than human-first.

People over profits, every damn time.