Most management textbooks start with a review of "scientific management," but Rosenthal demonstrates why scholars should look back farther to the slave plantations of the 18th and 19th century for the genesis of modern approaches to accounting and management. Using volumes of historical records, this book shows how the slave plantation industry developed sophisticated methods to control and measure every aspect of their plantation, including their slaves. There are direct lines from these practices to the development of org charts and time and motion studies - Henry Gantt of Gantt chart fame, for example, grew up in a family that had grown rich from owning slaves and almost certainly used these same management methods.

All of this cries out for a reckoning with different management practices that have become commonplace - individual work measurement, the myopic focus on easy to measure quantitative metrics, etc. If you're in management or people analytics even peripherally, this is a must read.