Accounting History

The world is facing difficult, uncertain and challenging times, which have consequences for accounting practice, education and research. This new and uncertain environment may lead us to conclude that accounting research should focus on the present and develop answers to be implemented in the future. Does this mean that accounting history must be put aside for the moment? We start from the position that accounting history continues to matter and that accounting history researchers have developed their perspectives and methodological and theoretical approaches considerably since the early 1990s in terms of diverse fields and topics of research. This article aims to explore how accounting history research can expand by seeking innovation in theories, sources, methodologies and writing. It demonstrates that accounting history is not static and researchers can contribute to its further recognition and dissemination. Through the innovative study of the past, researchers may continue to contribute to new and informed ways for the world to be managed and governed.

Although widely acknowledged as a foremost event of the Victorian age, accounting aspects of the Great Exhibition of 1851 have received limited attention. This article analyses accounting, control and audit at what was the first ‘universal’ Exhibition. Specific foci include the adoption of a cash-based accounting and financial reporting regimen, systems for protecting substantial volumes of cash and the nature of external and internal auditing. Insights are provided into the contemporary operation of these practices in a substantially unexplored setting. Visibility is also given to the role of the backstage personnel in the accounting and finance function, particularly the Financial Officer, who applied knowledge and skills drawn from the Commissariat Service. The latter analysis augments our understanding of the significance of the military in the development of accounting in nineteenth-century Britain. The study reflects on the research potential of exhibitions as a site for exploring diverse themes in accounting history.

Contributing to the expanding examination of the accounting policies that facilitated slavery's persistence in the United States, this study examines the Gradual Abolition Act of 1804 of New Jersey, the last Northern state to emancipate enslaved humans. New Jersey's Act included a provision for payments to white ‘masters’ for the care of children born after the Act to mothers who were – and remained – enslaved. These payments were considered a form of ‘compensated abolition’ and were included in the Act because prior efforts to persuade enslavers in New Jersey to agree to an eventual end to human enslavement had failed. With a focus on the children in Montgomery Township, this article investigates how the State of New Jersey disbursed the funds for this provision, and expands on previous research on the role of accounting for slavery by examining the crucial role states – including Northern states that are often overlooked in studies of United States' slavery – played in perpetuating this brutal system.

This article aims to provide a chronicle and analysis of how the household accounting role for women in Meiji era Japan was created, starting with the government's hurried introduction of ‘bookkeeping’ and ‘home economics’ as separate disciplines, followed by its later ‘Japanisation’ and gender assignment of these subjects and ending with its consequent popularisation in Japan of keeping track of the inflow and outflow of money in a household (receipts and disbursements, and bookkeeping) that eventually led to the unification of both disciplines into a single system of ‘household bookkeeping’. Our work also sheds light on how the introduction of Western-style bookkeeping and its customisation to Japanese needs played a role in the development of Meiji-era household accounting education in Japan, and in so doing helped lay down the groundwork for the establishment of the country's future social fabric.

This study examines the tone of editorials published in the Journal of Accountancy. Drawing upon prior historical accounting and linguistic-anthropological research, the study proposes that editorials in practitioner journals like the Journal of Accountancy communicate an expressive tone to internal audiences. This tone from the top is important because it communicates a professional worldview to a geographically dispersed and somewhat heterogeneous readership. The study utilises computerised methods to identify the tone expressed about key topics in 46,189 sentence-level editorial utterances published in the Journal between 1916 and 1973. The analysis illustrates that topics involving external social actors, institutions and events were more likely to use a negative tone compared to the topics speaking about internal aspects of the profession. The study contributes to our understanding of professional accounting narratives by enumerating the topics that Journal of Accountancy editorials speak about, by illustrating how sentence tone varies depending on the sentence topic and by documenting how the prevalence of certain topics changes over time.

Italian accounting history studies have greatly contributed to the international academic debate, thanks both to their scientific quality and to the rich presence in Italy of archives and historical artifacts. This article analyses the growth of the scientific contributions of Italian scholars in international journals, providing insights into future research directions. The study adopts a bibliometric analysis based on the similarity visualisation technique. 145 articles published between 1993 and 2022 are analysed using the VOSviewer software. The findings of the study show a growing number of publications in international journals by Italian scholars, particularly from 2017 (72 articles). The findings also reveal the existence of four main thematic clusters:governmentality, accounting and accountability practices, power and accounting, and cost accounting and institutional theory. Hence, the article aims to map, systematise and deepen these contributions in such a way as to identify the most important research fields, providing insights into the most recent developments of Italian accounting history studies.