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
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- 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
Humans as cost objects: 18th century Portuguese slave trading
- Authors: West, Brian , Pinto, Ofelia
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: 13th World Congress of Accounting Historians. Newcastle Upon Tyne. 17-19 July, 2012
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Based on extensive archival research, the cost accounting techniques that were developed and applied by the Companhia Geral do Grão Pará e Maranhão for the purpose of trading in human beings (slaves) in the second half of the 18th century are documented and analysed. It is shown that the company developed a sophisticated costing system that has parallels to many of the techniques of costing in use today: the distinction between direct and indirect costs, the allocation of overhead costs and the reallocation of costs associated with “normal spoilage”. Located within a growing literature that documents accounting’s “dark side”, and informed by the theoretical concept of “action at a distance”, this research demonstrates how accounting techniques were fundamental to enabling the reprehensible episode of human misery that slave trading constituted.