The Violent Efficacy Of The Whip
The technology of slavery is often assigned to the violent efficacy of the whip. But the measures of the scale and the ledger were also, as Edward Baptiste neatly articulates, ‘key parts of the “whipping-machine” system that raised cotton output steadily over time’. Whips would balance accounts at the end of the day when the scale came up short, with violence filling the space between expectation and outcome. The ledger as an instrument of torture, weaponized measurement and documentation, and bookkeeping as a means to push ever larger production of both cotton and terror is just as culpable as the whip.
Such exploitation has deep roots in the plantation pushing systems of the nineteenth century, where the commercial output of individual slaves was measured with intense scrutiny. Economic imperative for growth at any cost was held together through the granular recording of picking performance per dehumanized ‘hand’. Hands who fell short were brutally beaten. But what is measured can be managed, and as aspirations towards national growth and influence increased, so the demand for increased output scaled in parallel. As economic demand for cotton grew, so did the means and methods of ensuring a Southern output which matched such increasing demand from the mills of Manchester. As Baptiste eloquently explains, ‘fearing punishment or even death, minds scrambled to come up with ways to speed hands’.
The process by which human effort is abstracted into statistical record, which can then be measured, analyzed, and optimized is a critical part of modern business. We see such methods of scrutinizing behavior show up strongly in our experience of sports, politics, supply chains, and especially weaponized for commercial means in digital products. Insight into the duration of engagement, where we’ve been before and where we might be inclined to go afterwards, allow organizations invested in the collection of such data the means to serve us more targeted, optimized messaging with higher and higher behavioral propensity to purchase. Precisely targeted advertisements unrelentingly follow us around the web.
This passive digital servitude can often feel self-serving and voluntary. Most of the time we are unaware even of the extent to which it is happening. Such data can also be weaponized to influence and shape political outcomes, expose the private, and centralize vast repositories of our willingly given personal information into the hands of the few.
Baptiste’s work provides deeper, more visceral context to Eric Williams’ alignment of the origins of slavery with economic demand, but it’s the specific systems of measurement perpetually oriented towards faster and bigger, and an inherently capitalist economic imperative of more which justified and supported the use of violence meted out against those held in slavery at the end of the whip. Ledgers and scales became the origin and justification of such violence, which was economic in source, and abhorrent in racially motivated, immoral retrospect. Baptiste motivates that ‘the scale and slate and lash did, in fact, continually extract a truth: the maximum that a man, woman, or child could pick’. The whip did not act alone, and those setting quotas, much as we see in modern agricultural and digital abuses, act as shadow figures with a high, but hidden degree of overlooked responsibility.
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