Accounting History

This paper explores the interface of race and accounting on Hawaiian sugar plantations during the 1835-1920 period. The data examined at the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association (HSPA) archives indicate that Caucasian and ethnically Hawaiian workers were paid significantly higher wages and held a disproportionately larger number of managerial positions than Asian counterparts. In addition, workers from different ethnic groups were imported at various times to stem an existing group's solidarity and demands for higher wages and better conditions. We review the accounting techniques used on the plantations and provide examples showing how the HSPA employed racist policies, controlled labour, and instituted productivity and cost control measures. The archives examined contain an extensive amount of data on worker attendance and field productivity; however, they include no records on the performance of individual workers. The absence of these data suggests that race rather than efficiency served as the primary measuring calculus of plantation work.

From the first English settlement in colonial America to the beginning of the Revolution, the legal status of account books evolved. During this period, there was a scarcity of hard currency which made commercial transactions largely dependent upon a credit based, barter based economic system. Business transactions often were represented by book debt. As merchants brought legal actions over book debt disputes, American colonial courts and legislatures began to examine the English common law rules that placed several restrictions on the introduction of account books into evidence. Responding to economic and social necessity, colonial America developed a legal system that was more flexible and pragmatic than was the English system in regard to admitting account books into evidence. Thus, American colonial courts and legislatures met the commercial needs of the new world, and in so doing, provided the impetus for examining accounting standards, fiduciary duty and financial statements in today's American legal system.

In their archival study, Roy and Spraakman (1996) found that the Hudson's Bay Company had developed extensive management accounting techniques by the 1820s. However, they did not concern themselves with the origins of the management accounting techniques employed in the 1820s. Based on the Company's archives for 1670 to 1820, it is clear that the basic components of the management accounting techniques were in place from the Company's beginnings or by 1700. These practices were changed significantly in 1810 as the Company grappled with declining profits and the need for new management accounting techniques that allowed for efficiency in inland trading. This trading had different requirements than trading from a few posts with easy ocean access to London. Although the successful techniques were put in place in 1810, it took until the 1820s and the efforts of Governor George Simpson for them to work effectively as a system. This paper also tests hypotheses developed from transaction cost economics and makes suggestions for a transaction cost economics theory of management accounting.

This study involves an examination of the financial statements of seven Belgian colliery companies in the first half of the twentieth century with a focus on assessing how they were influenced by the institutional and regulatory framework. It begins with a discussion of the regulation of accounting in Belgium in that period. While regulation was found to be limited, the State had an impact on the magnitude of reported figures through taxation and also through reporting obligations to a government agency supervising the colliery industry. The cases demonstrate differences with respect to disclosure, valuation, capitalisation, revaluation, and amortisation. Most companies involved changed their accounting policy significantly during the observation period. It was common for important changes in accounting policy, with material consequences for the reported results, not to be explained in the financial statements.

During the period 1985 to 1992, the major Victorian State Government (Australia) public trading authorities were required to prepare Rate of Return Reporting (RoRR) accounts as supplementary statements to their annual historical cost financial statements. RoRR represents a version of current (replacement) cost accounting. This paper provides a background to the Victorian RoRR requirements and an examination of the financial statements, over a five year period, of three of the six authorities required to comply with the RoRR requirements. The paper investigates the differences between the historical cost and RoRR profit and loss statements and balance sheets, analysing the major reasons for the differences and the impacts of RoRR on the reported performance and financial position of the trading authorities.