In the past couple of decades, scholars have emphasized the sheer brutality of life under slavery and how that brutality stemmed directly from the fact that slavery was, above all, a business. From the biggest slaveholders, whose sophisticated accounting techniques and productivity experiments helped pave the way for modern business management, to the middle-class farmer renting enslaved labor whenever he could afford to, slaveowners made their money from an unholy fusion of precision management and cruel violence. Profit was the point.

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Persons: slaveowners