Modern corporate management techniques originated on plantations, not nineteenth-century railroads.

Evidence

Slavery not only shaped America’s political institutions, laws, and financial culture; it also helped mold modern management techniques. Historians have tended to connect the development of modern business practices to the nineteenth-century railroad industry, viewing plantation slavery as precapitalistic, even primitive. It’s a more comforting origin story, one that protects the idea that America’s economic ascendancy developed not because of, but in spite of, millions of Black people toiling on plantations. But management techniques used by nineteenth-century corporations were very similar to those implemented during the previous century by plantation owners. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 569

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s stated goal — this is the reframing move: locating the origin story (railroads) versus the claimed actual origin (plantations) in the development of management. Ties to the origin-stories-as-infrastructure key idea.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how do mainstream business historians (like Alfred Chandler) respond to the claim that plantation management preceded corporate hierarchies? This is a specific contested empirical claim vs the reframing thesis.