In recent years, the ties between Wall Street (and "Northern" banks more generally) and the institution of American slavery have become a growing subject of interest for scholars, educators, and the general public, cemented in popular discourse by efforts like The New York Times' 1619 Project. These projects examine the role that slavery and colonialism have played in American nation-building, as well as in the material and cultural conditions that shape contemporary life in the U.S.

The Brown Brothers & Company Records are, formally speaking, banal: precursors to modern spreadsheets, they're filled mostly with ledgers tracking credits and debits, line items cascading into sums.

Nestled among the neat columns and standardized 19th-century script, however, lie stories (and, sometimes, mysteries) of the fraught and often insidious history of American capitalism.

The project of transcribing the Brown Brothers Collection is not necessarily a recuperative one — we likely won't be able to fully identify the individuals and locations named in the ledgers, let alone those erased, dehumanized, or otherwise ommitted from the record. Instead, we're interested in the Brown Brothers Collection as a site for examining historical conditions of possibility, and for understanding the historical contingency of our own conditions.

We acknowledge that transcribers contributing to this project may encounter content related to the sale and trade of human beings and violence against enslaved peoples and laborers. To some degree, transforming the BBC into machine- (and human-)readable data participates in the reproduction of black death and commodification, to borrow language from historian and digital humanist Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson.

We hope that rendering the ledgers legible — and therefore opening up their research and pedagogical potential — presents another opportunity for us to confront the entanglement of black death and commodification and the rise of finance capitalism. As historians and students of New York City, we hope, too, to get a glimpse into the operational texture of Wall Street and into the quotidian recordkeeping practices that no doubt shape institutional records management today. Indeed, the ledgers may provide fruitful context for considering questions of information architecture, algorithmic bias, surveillance capitalism, and the data kept about and around human beings.

Rather than make the everyday operations of historic Wall Street (and the injustices it enacted) feel mundane, we hope the ledgers illustrate just how much power tabulation and genres of bookkeeping can wield. We hope you'll join us in making this collection more accessible to students, teachers, researchers, and other community members.