Absentee owners’ salaried managers brutalized slaves to maximize profit

Evidence

Yourmisfortuneisthatiamblack,”wrotetheslave Philipeau to his owner, Madame de Mauger, in 1784. “I am black; that is my only fault. If I could whiten myself you would see, with the will of God, an increase in your wealth.” Philipeau lived on a plantation located in the rich Artibonite plain of Saint-Domingue. He had been born there, and had served as Madame de Mauger’s domestic slave until the 1760s, when she and her husband left to settle permanently in France. By the next decade Philipeau had become the commandeur—slave driver— on the plantation. He was its most important slave: he oversaw the daily work in the fields, made sure the other slaves were fed and taken care of, and punished those who failed in their duties. He took his orders not directly from Madame de Mauger, but from the salaried manager she had hired to oversee her properties in the colony. Under pressure to deliver profits to their distant bosses, and eager to gain a foothold in the colony through the commissions they received on plantation production, such managers were often brutal to the slaves, stinting their food and medicine, forcing them to work on Sundays, and punishing them with great violence. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 133

Categorization

• XREF: The agency/principal problem — salaried managers brutalizing slaves to impress distant owners — echoes the diamond-trade defaulting and trust-over-secrecy readings on intermediary economics.