A primary economic function of a price system is the signal conveyed in the price.
When you replace free labor with coercion, you obviate the price signal. We should therefore expect accounting under unfree labor (slavery) to be *more* complex than under free-labor capitalism.
When you replace free labor with coercion, you obviate the price signal. We should therefore expect accounting under unfree labor (slavery) to be *more* complex than under free-labor capitalism.
The reason? In addition to the brutality of coerced labor, its lack of a functional price signal means the plantation overseer needs to turn to other empirics to figure out how to produce goods. So they invent non-priced measures of labor inputs and outputs, all coerced.
This is why some of the most complex accounting systems known to human history came from attempts at centrally planning an entire economy, such as in the Soviet Union. They ended disastrously, but necessarily relied on other input/output measures after destroying price signals.
So when the New History of Capitalism crowd & the 1619 project point to accounting books on the plantations and say "see? Their complexity proves that slavery is capitalism" they have it exactly backwards.
Plantation accounting proves the plantation was centrally planned.
Plantation accounting proves the plantation was centrally planned.
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