Time, Productivity, and Race in Plantation Management and Medicine

By the mid-nineteenth century, plantation enslavers in Louisiana and Cuba had developed a new form of plantation management. Clock-time discipline, hierarchical divisions of labor, and the scientific authority of numbers, as filtered through accounting technologies like the plantation ledger, helped planters see enslaved people's health in seemingly precise terms of time, productivity, and race. In this cruelly meticulous system, some elite physicians saw a potential scientific foundation for medicine. Using plantation business records, agricultural trade periodicals, physician correspondence, medical publications, and memoirs, this article examines plantation management of enslaved health; physician appreciation of its quantitative, supposedly rigorous methods; and the intersections of management science and racial science in physician writing, where there were noticeable differences between Louisiana and Cuba. Physicians in both places believed that, under judicious management, Black people's bodies were naturally inclined to productivity, but in Cuba, there were different degrees of Blackness that needed to be taken into consideration.