Depreciation accounting was pioneered by enslavers valuing human beings as capital assets.

Evidence

Perhaps most remarkably, they also developed ways to calculate depreciation, a breakthrough in modern management procedures, by assessing the market value of enslaved workers over their life spans. Values generally peaked between the prime ages of twenty and forty but were individually adjusted up or down based on sex, strength, and temperament: people reduced to data points. In her book The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, the historian Daina Ramey Berry shows that enslaved workers even had monetary value in death, their bodies sold as cadavers to medical schools and physicians. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 572

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s case-study goal: a specific contested empirical claim (depreciation invented in slavery) vs. the reframing thesis (modern management technique). Berry’s book is the cite to hunt down.
• SEED: Essay angle on how management-accounting history must be retold once depreciation’s origins are traced to slave valuation.