Eighteenth-century Jamaican plantations ran hierarchies as complex as the Royal Navy’s.

Evidence

Planters aggressively expanded their operations to capitalize on economies of scale inherent to cotton growing, buying more enslaved workers, investing in large gins and presses, and experimenting with different seed varieties. To do so, they developed complicated workplace hierarchies that combined a central office, made up of owners and lawyers in charge of capital allocation and long-term strategy, with several divisional units, responsible for different operations. In her book Accounting for Slavery, the historian Caitlin Rosenthal writes of one Jamaican plantation where, in 1779, the owner supervised a top attorney (a kind of financial manager), who supervised another attorney, who supervised an overseer, who supervised three bookkeepers, who supervised sixteen enslaved head drivers and specialists (like bricklayers), who supervised hundreds of enslaved workers. This organizational form was very advanced for its time, displaying a level of hierarchal complexity equaled only by large government structures, like that of Britain’s Royal Navy. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 570

Categorization

• CANDY: The 1779 chain of command — owner to attorney to attorney to overseer to three bookkeepers to sixteen head drivers to hundreds of workers — is a striking, easy-to-retell detail.
• ADDENDUM: Speaks to ‘Grafting & Growth’ style of infrastructure thinking — management as underused infrastructure lineage — though tangentially.