From ‘pure Satisfaction and Curiosity’ to the ‘particular gain or loss upon each article’: early modern philosophies of accounting in English accounting textbooks

ABSTRACT

Beginning with a periodisation of a set of 45 textbooks published in English between 1547 and 1799, and analysed by J. R. Edwards, Graeme Dean, and Frank Clarke in 2009, the study shows that in this sample, a significant shift took place in the use of managerial references between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Moreover, within the second period, the qualitative analysis of a sub-sample of five of these textbooks indicates that these references appeared within different epistemological contexts, not all of them business-related. Early in the 1700s, accounting techniques were presented at first as tools of self-discovery and temperance. Textbooks from the mid-eighteenth century increasingly referred to the pursuit of scientific knowledge, maybe under the influence of the Enlightenment, while late-eighteenth-century authors started to develop a business-oriented epistemology.

KEYWORDS:

• Eighteenth century
• management accounting
• accounting textbooks
• enlightenment
• capitalism
• Sombart thesis

Acknowledgements

The idea for this paper originated with Charles R. Baker; credit, and many thanks, to him. I also wish to express my gratitude to Yannick Lemarchand who introduced me to accounting history, Cheryl McWatters who helped me navigate its complex historiography and multiple worlds; the participants in the Ormskirk Accounting History Review conference in which an early version of this paper was presented and (hopefully) improved; and anonymous reviewers, who put in yeoman’s work in assessing, and again, improving it.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This is what statisticians call the ‘null hypothesis’– there would be zero relationship between the two variables, date of publication of one hand, giving performance advice on the other.

2 This is the exact two-tailed probability for a 2×2 table with two categories, ‘date’ (before/after 1675) and ‘advice’ (with/without advice); I used the calculator set up by Richard Lowry at http://vassarstats.net/tab2×2.html. Even including the confidence interval, the statistical power of the test, that is, its probability of correctly detecting a correlation, is certainly above 80% at the 99% confidence level, with a central value at 93%, confirming that the basic result (some correlation) is very robust (I used the calculator at http://statpages.info/ctab2×2.html, by John C. Pezzullo).

3 At the same 99% confidence level, the weakest possible correlation, at the lower bound of the confidence interval, would translate into 22% more chances for a more recent book to contain performance assessment advice (odds ratio 1.217, again using http://statpages.info/ctab2×2.html).

4 North’s The gentleman accomptant (1714); London’s A compleat system of bookkeeping (1752); Gordon’s The universal accountant (1765, 2 vol.); Thompson’s The accomptant’s oracle (1777); and Hamilton’s An introduction to merchandise (1788). The editions used in this paper are the same ones used in Edwards, Dean, and Clarke 2009, except for London, for whom the 1758 3rd edition is used. For the period pre-1675, similar advice is found only in Ympyn Christoffels (1547) according to the tabulation in Edwards, Dean and Clarke.

5 The Eighteenth Century Collections Online, www.gale.cengage.com/EighteenthCentury/, database lists 13 editions of Mair’s Book-keeping Methodiz’d; William Webster and Thomas Dilworth are a distant second, with seven editions each.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from University Sorbonne-Nouvelle Paris 3 and the EA 4399 CREW-CRAN research center.