Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture by Magnus Ressel

Giving the order to send out European ships to transport Africans to the Americas was a rather discreet operation that was strongly connected to the perception of the slave trade by its traders via account books and sheets. The effects of bookkeeping on entrepreneurial activities has lately been discussed more intensely: Due to the abstraction and organizational performance of bookkeeping, heterogeneous objects
and services were homogenized and transactions got evaluated in monetary terms. Accounting thus contributed to a perception of the economy as a set of components that interacted with each other only via money flows. The resulting detachment of the slave traders from the practical realities of the slave trade was – as shall be argued here – a pillar of the asymmetrical power relation in the transatlantic slave trade. To exemplify this, accounting files of the Belgian slave trade of the 1780s will be presented in detail alongside public writings of the same slave traders.