Abstract

"Capitalist Timekeeping before Hourly Wages: The Fiscal Year, The Tax Year, Yearly Labor Contracts, Maturity Dates, and Reckoning Days in Antebellum America"

Alexis McCrossen, Southern Methodist University (amccross@smu.edu)

“Capitalist Timekeeping” asks: what role did the calendar as a timekeeping tool play in the development of business in the United States, and more broadly in the development of managerial capitalism? The paper draws on my research into the history of the New Year in Europe and the United States, as well as on my expertise as an historian of time and timekeeping. It looks at the early nineteenth century, when local, regional, and national practices that accounted for the year coalesced such that the year became a standard unit of time for budgeting, accounting, renting, some types of hiring, and some forms of lending. I have worked with a wide range of sources from the antebellum period, including: federal, state, and local government papers related to budgeting and taxation; bookkeeping guidebooks and account books; newspaper notices and advertisements related to hiring and debt collection; bank ledgers and account books; diary entries and letters related to business affairs; and reflections in memoirs, periodicals, and newspapers about “the state of the economy.” While a wage labor system and the scientific management of labor are certainly fundamental time-based features of industrial capitalism, the extensive historical focus on them has occluded attention the development of other systems of time management equally important to large-scale, managerial capitalism.