Account books as social technologies

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how historians have reconceived account books from a source that describes economic and social actions to a social technology that constructs them. It examines the interpretive changes that this turn entailed and illustrates its application to three types of historical relationships: time, slavery, and the family. It aims to de-mystify account books as sources requiring unilateral, expert interpretation to one that is open to a variety of interpretive possibilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Account books
• social technology
• performativity
• discounting
• slavery
• family history

Introduction

Account books have long been a staple of business and economic history. Yet ‘account book’ is a deceptively simple label for a remarkably varied set of sources. Ledgers gained increasing attention among business and economic historians in the 1950s and 1960s as part of the growing prominence of quantitative methods. Cliometrics introduced a hypothesis-driven approach that depended upon the epistemic premise that accounting records reflected observations of realist economic and business phenomena and their quantitative magnitudes.

Over the last generation, however, scholars from a variety of disciplines have increasingly taken a constructivist view of accounting, examining how account books act as technologies for constructing business and social relationships, as well as describing them. Referring to account books as social technologies emphasizes not only how they are social, connecting people and instruments, but also how they are technologies in their materiality and in their performativity. This article examines this interpretive turn and suggests its value for examining a variety of historically constructed social relationships.

The social turn

Accounting history has incorporated a broad range of theories since the ‘social turn’ beginning in the late 1970s (Carnegie et al. 2020; Chapman, Cooper, and Miller 2009; Quattrone 2009). While earlier research examined accounting practice as a progressive tool to improve efficiency and rationality in business, by 1987, Anthony Hopwood canonically argued that accounting is best ‘conceived as being in motion,’ both ‘reflective’ and ‘constitutive,’ and, above all, ‘as an artifact residing in the domain of the social’ (Hopwood 2005). Business historians have similarly embraced this outloo.

From a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective, account books are instruments. They are not merely artifacts or epistemes, but both (MacKenzie 2009; Rieppel, Lean, and Deringer 2018; Lipartito 2013). To Barbara Hahn, technology is not a machine; it includes the process that produced the machine. Technologies have consequences ‘shaped by the context of their origins’ and ‘the systems which both compose and surround technologies begin in social construction but mature to determinism that can shape human behavior’ (Hahn 2017, 557). In a 2017 forum on overlapping interests between historians of capitalism and technology, Seth Rockman includes account books as part of the ‘material infrastructure of the rapidly expanding Atlantic economy’—‘the paper technologies of capitalism.’ Rockman blends enthusiasm for analyzing materiality with a caution ‘the agency it accords to the nonhuman and the technological determinism that appears to follow from “thing power”’ (Rockman 2017, 496–98). Accounting texts do not simply reflect an existing economic reality but can act as ‘embodied knowledge’ that represent ways of seeing and imagining economic calculations, values, and relationships.

Setting history in motion helps to demonstrate how account books – and earlier incarnations – mediated and shaped the very things they ostensibly represented. As Paulo Quattrone and François-Regis Puyou argue, ‘Accounting does make organization coalesce and it surprisingly does so through mechanisms of repetition that divides, separates, and classifies. It is thus a “device” (from the Latin dividere meaning to divide and separate) that generates realities such as organizations, identities, and by extension, entire communities’ (Puyou and Quattrone 2018; Quattrone and Puyou 2019, 4–6). The reading aloud of adversaria in Rome to transfer accounts from scrolls to wax tablets, for example, mixed esthetic and pragmatic concerns about organization, credibility, and verifiability. The act of oral translation was an early form of auditing (audire being Latin for to hear) as well as combined authority of the ritual and the durability of the tablets. To borrow from Donald Mackenzie, ‘the “equipment” matters’ (MacKenzie 2009, 4). However, as this example shows, the historical context and performance of using technology also matter, opening spaces for disruption and change.

Economic sociologists, notably Michel Callon, describe performativity as an essentially historical process. Callon draws on the philosopher JL Austin’s construction of ‘performative utterances’—i.e. ‘utterances that do something’ as opposed to those that simply report (MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2007, 317, 335). More than semiotic constructions that are inherently performative, performative utterances are verbal acts, such as to say, ‘I object’ in a courtroom is to intervene in the proceedings. Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) further decenters the actor as agent, a statement with its actualization. Callon writes, ‘the game is never over, for new framings are always possible’ (2007, 321). There are other models of text and performance that contribute to understanding the generative potential of epistemic uncertainties, including what is left unspoken, inaccessible, or elided in recordkeeping (Stoler 2009). Power is an essential dimension in analyzing the varied configurations possible in the construction, use, and consequences of accounting records.

Core questions facilitate the analysis of account books as social technologies, including the following:

1. Logic: How do accounting techniques use numbers to map a logic or order onto the messiness of the social and natural world? What are the assumptions that go into constructing this order? How do they work? Part of this is being aware of the goals of the account keepers. The most fundamental question is perhaps the most obvious one: why this account was being kept. Being aware of this question can help us from simply retracing the logic of account keepers without asking if their questions are the most important ones to answer.

2. Surveillance: Consider what it meant to be ‘accounted for.’ Account books are a form of surveillance. What options were available to those who were being watched? Do the records reveal moments when they attempted to resist or subvert being measured and monitored? If so, what were they seeking to avoid or change?

3. Appeal: Why did specific accounting techniques take hold in that particular social context? Why does a social environment nurture a particular set of accounting tools?

4. Functions: What functions did those accounts, records, or valuations perform? What did they do? Sometimes the lived functions of account books differ from the ostensible logic of production. More than a social question, this is also a matter of materiality. What objects and actions are tied to particular accounting functions?

5. Connections: Follow individuals over time for different stories. If there are names, can you follow someone forward and backward over time? What social and organizational relationships are evident? Alternatively, how do genealogical or personal sources unlock account book entries? Be open to decentering known connections, organizations, or hierarchies.

6. Disruption: Look for moments of disruption. When did accounting start and stop and why? Are there changes in the format of the records or in what is being added up? Changing form on the page is often a clue that something has shifted off the page.

7. Consequences: What were the effects of these accounting devices? How did they shape (and reshape) the world they purported to describe?

8. Invisibility: If a core function of accounting is recording economic events and rendering them visible, organized, and classified, what is left out or even obfuscated?

Constructing social relationships

The interpretation of account books from a socio-technology perspective has been applied to an increasing variety of historical relationships. In this section, we highlight three contributions on ways of utilizing these questions to consider account books as social technologies. The contributions come from William Deringer on the history of discounting, Caitlin Rosenthal on the history of slavery, and Rachel Tamar Van on family history, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and the U.S.A.

On discounting and calculating the future

Account books constitute quantitative representations that both reflect their social contexts and act upon their environment. Centering on the accounting of English coal mining engineers from the Great Northern Coal Field of northern England, it is possible to trace the rise of ‘exponential discounting’ as a mathematical technique to predict the future value of a mine and discount to the mine’s present value.¹ To some, these engineers, known as colliery viewers, were pioneer industrial accountants. Viewers combined technical engineering expertise that ranged from geology and mine architecture, to steam technology, with responsibility for business administration.

To predict profits, viewers estimated the likely yield of a mine (how much could be mined/year for the lifespan of the mine) relative to projected costs to mine and price of coal, to turn this into an assessment of annual profits. They then imagined the mine as a financial instrument akin to an annuity that would pay out a set sum for the number of years the mine was expected to pay out and used discounting calculations to ascertain the mine’s ostensible present value.

This is the history of modern discounting (Brackenborough, McLean, and Oldroyd 2001; Deringer 2017). Discounting uses the logic of compound interest to assign a present price for something that will happen in the future, such as coal to be mined. The technique took off around 1800, was rapidly adopted, and abounds today in finance, actuarial science, and insurance. It is pervasive in modern economic life.

Where did this come from? Coal mines were frequently leased out to ‘adventurers’ but drew upon agricultural precedents for how to calculate a fair price for the lease. Viewers’ use of discounting proved transformative by providing a standardized framework for valuing mining properties and thus for turning unmined seams of coal into stable, calculable assets with knowable ‘fair’ prices for investment. These market devices have become a crucial component of the architecture of a new market for fossil fuel assets (Muniesa, Millo, and Callon 2007). Ironically, these techniques gave an appearance of safe investing in such a hazardous industry: financial investment surged, but so, too, did the number of workers’ deaths. The period from approximately 1800 to 1820 was the deadliest in UK’s coal mining history.

On seeing past slaveholding logics

Slaveholders were interested in productivity and profitability, both from enslaved people’s lives and their labor. In an 1859 record of cotton picking from a Louisiana cotton plantation called Elder Grove, the overseer recorded how many pounds of cotton each enslaved person picked 6 days a week. With names listed down the left side, days across the top, and totals at right and bottom, the record is a neat grid of numbers that first appears most useful for answering questions about things like productivity – the very things that framed the ways the owner and overseer thought about slavery (Rosenthal 2021).²

If you read between the lines, however, this record also has much more to say about very different questions, revealing the power and coercion at the heart of American chattel slavery. Moving slowly, we can pause to interpret missing data, including the many gaps when enslaved people suffered from illnesses. In following Charles over the course of the picking season, the records show that he ran away at the peak of the harvest, gaining respite at the time when the planter most desired his labor. He stayed away for 3 full weeks, including days too rainy for people to be forced into the fields. Did someone shelter him? And how did he negotiate the conditions of his return? Another escape – a man named Mose – took place the week after Charles returned, speculating that these departures may have been connected.

Confronting a neat grid of numbers, it may seem like the best first step is to transcribe them into a spreadsheet and start calculating. Certainly, slaveholders would have wished they could manipulate the data they collected – and the people it represented – so quickly and easily. While this kind of approach can be revealing, it can elevate the questions the document was designed to answerin this case, slaveholders’ questions, over more important ones. Consulting margins, scribbles, and missing data – things that are hard to put into a standard spreadsheet – can help us answer a much broader set of questions. Account books offer not only possibilities but also critical limits to understanding slavery (Fuentes 2016; Smallwood 2008, 2016; Morgan 2021).

On personal ties and producing family

Family and friends ostensibly disappear from account books and business correspondence with professionalization. Peter J McMinckle and Paul H. Jensen’s recently republished bibliography, The Birth of American Accountancy, a Bibliographic Analysis of Works on Accounting Published through 1820 historicizes idealized early American bookkeeping style (2022). Manuals used to inculcate clerks into bookkeeping contextualize the scope of idealized structures. George Fisher’s A Young Man’s Companion, first published in 1727 and popular through the early nineteenth century, offers a sample overview of standardized entries for double-entry bookkeeping. The reality is far messier. Trial balances, balance books and accounting following the death of a partner or the closing of a firm, all offer useful reckonings for firms and financials. However, account books can also tell other stories.

Ledgers reveal innovations in stabilizing family income and thus continuity of a lineage and caring for loved ones. According to records from the Boston-based trading house, Bryant, Sturgis, & Co., the tallies of their investment account for retired kinsman John Perkins Cushing outlived the firm itself. Ostensibly, the firm’s principals retired and passed their business to William Appleton & Co. in 1841. In fact, they continued to invest on behalf of a close circle of family and friends, especially trusts established on behalf of widows and daughters ‘in spite of coverture.’ When William Sturgis died in 1852, the firm listed income made for Cushing over the years. In seeking to understand family capital rather than firms, the money trail does not end here. Cushing’s account was picked up by another kinsman whose trading house underwent a similar shift to that of Bryant, Sturgis, & Co. – not only investing in commodities and industry but also managing investments on behalf of a growing cadre of family.³ These patterns raise interesting questions about family and capitalism not as moving apart, but as evolving and adapting together (Blackmar 2011; Thornton 2016).

The concept of family itself can be slippery, especially over generations (Yanagisako 2020; Trivellato 2009). Account books were sites of inclusion (and exclusion) and recorded concrete obligation between parties, often quantified. Thus, for example, trust accounts at John Murray Forbes & Co. denoted a new manifestation of the family’s business network in the ledgers. The firm’s financial network was both rooted in not only older legacies of families and firms collaborating in global trade and investment but also a new articulation of personal connections through the formation of trust accounts. While these accounts were not limited to kin, they were not open to the public. John Murray Forbes & Co. only managed investment accounts for a select range of family and close friends. The selectivity of the account holders suggests meaning for those who did have accounts. The ‘American Stock Investment’ account was managed for the Wu family of Guangzhou/Canton in southern China from the 1840s to the 1870s (Van forthcoming). The inclusion of the Wus within a relatively exclusive list of the Forbes’ inner circle thus connotes something about the nature of the relationship between families that goes beyond simple business collaboration.

Genealogical tools allow for the tracing of social worlds from account books, as well as to see account books themselves as genealogical records (Wulf 2012). In An Intimate Economy, Alexandra Finley uses account books to unpack how relationship between Silas Omohundro and his slave-concubine, Corinna Hinton, survives through recorded purchases – the purchase of her, goods for her, her own entrepreneurialism in managing Omohundro’s boardinghouse and household, her children by him, and their schooling (Finley 2020). Hinton is accounted for as commodity and market actor, as slave-laborer, and as family. And yet for the previously mentioned families, account books often hid value and masked relationships that were kept ‘off the books’ only to appear in reckonings like private letters, wills, and probate records.

Conclusion

There are as many right ways to approach account books as there are historical questions. Too often we skip ahead with our findings and, inadvertently, preserve the enigma of account books as sources.

Approaching account books as social technologies opens avenues of research. It presses historians to demystify the very tools, processes, and epistemes that embody the ‘calculative spirit’ of our age, to understand the social as well as economic worlds they help to produce (Appadurai 2016). Historians in particular have the potential to analyze account books as technologies in motion. Recognizing interdisciplinary contributions to the field advances appreciation of ledgers not as straightforward accounting devices requiring unilateral, expert interpretation, but as contingent objects and epistemic devices that are open to a range of interpretive possibilities.

Acknowledgement

Heartfelt thanks to Caitlin Rosenthal, Will Deringer, and Dan Wadhwani for their contributions, and to the Business History Conference organizers and membership for the excuse to pause and provocatively examine sources at the 2022 BHC Midyear Conference.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Tamar Van

Rachel Tamar Van is an associate professor of history at Cal Poly Pomona in southern California. She specializes in family capitalism and Americans in the Pacific. She has received the Bancroft Dissertation Award, and support from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and more. Her publications include articles in Diplomatic History and Pacific Historical Review. Her book, Family Capital: Yankee Kinship Networks and the Shaping of the Global Economy is under contract with Columbia University Press.

Notes

1. For related primary sources, see the collections of the Northeast of England Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers. Papers of leading viewer John Buddle can be found here: https://mininginstitute.org.uk/collections/archives/buddle-collection/.

2. ‘Statement of Cotton,’ 1859–1866, Robert H. Stewart Account Books, Mss. 404, 4732, Louisiana, and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, LA.

3. See account books located at Baker Library, Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, Massachusetts.