Accounting and the history of the everyday life of captains, sailors and common seamen in eighteenth-century Portuguese slave trading
- Authors: Pinto, Ofelia , West, Brian
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Accounting History Vol. 22, no. 3 (2017), p. 320-347
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This archive-based case study uses accounting and related records to uncover details of the everyday life of the captains, sailors and seamen who manned the ships that allowed Portuguese slave trading to flourish during the eighteenth century. By elaborating the lives of the crews of the ships of the Companhia Geral do Grão Pará e Maranhão, a Portuguese chartered company created in 1755 for the express purpose of slave trading, the study contributes to a growing body of literature that uses accounting documents as a source of social history and enables previously silent voices to be heard. Furthermore, the study brings together two notions which have previously remained separated in the accounting history literature: the everyday lives of participants within the setting of a ‘dark’ episode of human history. © 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.
Accounting, slavery and social history : The legacy of an eighteenth-century Portuguese chartered company
- Authors: Pinto, Ofelia , West, Brian
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Accounting History Vol. 22, no. 2 (2017), p. 141-166
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Based on extensive archival research, this study documents and analyses the accounting techniques that the Companhia Geral do Grão Pará e Maranhão applied to its slave trading operations during the second half of the eighteenth century. The surviving accounting records of this Portuguese chartered company reveal – in meticulous detail – the integral role that accounting technology played in enabling the slave trade to flourish. However, and paradoxically, while evidencing this culpability the same accounting records also document the essential humanity of the slaves and preserve details of the bleak circumstances of their existence. Slaves are typically lamented as a lost people consigned to a tragic and an eternal anonymity, but it is from accounting records that many aspects of their lives can be reconstructed. In this way, the accounting records studied are also shown to provide a latent source of social history that constitutes a profound mea culpa. © 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.
Accounting and Slavery: the case of Companhia Geral do Grão Pará e Maranhão (1755-1778)
- Authors: Pinto, Ofelia
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
- Full Text:
- Description: Contrary to the traditional view of accounting as a neutral technical practice, recent studies have increasingly viewed this technology as being social and institutional in both its orientation and effects. An important outcome of these portrayals of accounting’s decisive influence within organisations and broader contexts has been to highlight the enabling role it has played within significant historical events. This has included exploration of what has been termed the “dark side” of accounting: abhorrent episodes from human history in which accounting has been implicated. Slavery is one such episode. Adopting the conception of accounting as a social and institutional practice, this interpretative historical study applies the concept of “action at a distance” and previous literature on the interrelations between accounting and the state as a conceptual framework to critically analyse the accounting practices that were developed and adopted by the Companhia Geral do Grão Pará e Maranhão, a Portuguese company established primarily for the purpose of trading in human beings (slaves) in the second half of the 18th century. As well as providing a novel addition to the literature dealing with the “dark side” of accounting, this archive-based case study also sheds further light on accounting’s potential to act as a powerful agent of social change, including its facilitation of episodes of human misery.
- Description: Doctor of Philsophy
Links in the chain: British slavery, Victoria and South Australia
- Authors: Coventry, C. J.
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Before/Now : Journal of the collaborative Research Centre in Australian History (CRCAH) Vol. 1, no. 1 (2019), p. 27-56
- Full Text:
- Reviewed:
- Description: Beneficiaries of British slavery were present in colonial Victoria and provincial South Australia, a link overlooked by successive generations of historians. The Legacies of British Slave-ownership database, hosted by University College, London, reveals many people in these colonies as having been connected to slave money awarded as compensation by the Imperial Parliament in the 1830s. This article sets out the beneficiaries to demonstrate the scope of exposure of the colonies to slavery. The list includes governors, jurists, politicians, clergy, writers, graziers and financiers, as well as various instrumental founders of South Australia. While Victoria is likely to have received more of this capital than South Australia, the historical significance of compensation is greater for the latter because capital from beneficiaries of slavery, particularly George Fife Angas and Raikes Currie, ensured its creation. Evidence of beneficiaries of slavery surrounds us in the present in various public honours and notable buildings.