ABSTRACT Access to water has long posed financial and political challenges for urban centres, yet the historical role of accounting in governing and managing water supply remains underexplored. Focusing on nineteenth-century Cork, during a period of urbanisation, industrialisation, and increasing pressure on municipal water supplies, this study examines how accounting operated as a key actor in water governance, management, and conservation. Using actor-network theory (ANT), it examines the relationships between human and non-human actors to show how accounting both shaped and was shaped by evolving networks of water provision. Based on archival records from the 1880s, the analysis reveals accounting not as a passive tool of financial control, but as an active agent in shaping water-related practices and policies. In doing so, the study contributes to accounting history by illuminating the complex actor-networks behind public utility provision, thereby demonstrating the value of applying ANT in historical research. While grounded in history, the findings offer reflections on the ongoing tensions between financial oversight and public resource management.

ABSTRACT The British railway ‘mania’ of 1845–1846 remains a puzzle. Building on Marx’s observation that it was a ‘great railway swindle’, Bryer proposed a ‘swindle hypothesis’ that underlying this ‘mania’ was a ‘social conspiracy’ by the London wealthy, who orchestrated the boom and bust, centrally by not defining profit, allowing directors to manipulate accounts and ‘swindle’ investors, who incurred large losses. This study examines counter-arguments that directors did not systematically manipulate accounts by employing Marx’s theory of crises and new evidence to explain the ‘mania’. It investigates a revised hypothesis, that the ‘social conspiracy’ of history, Britain’s transition from landed, commercial and money capitalism, to industrial capitalism, produced the conditions that facilitated the ‘swindle’ underlying the ‘mania’. The transition increased the forces of production, multiplied by railways, which generated intra-class conflict during the 1840s over the ‘mode-of-exploitation’ between the dominant ‘gentlemanly’ and emergent ‘industrial’ capitalists. Basing regulation on gentlemanly capitalists’ political economy allowed railway directors to resist a falling rate of profit, ‘swindling’ investors by unscrupulously understating depreciation. The author supports this story by reanalysing accounting history and comparing actual with required charges derived from modelling aggregate capital expenditures, and concludes that the revised hypothesis should be on accounting historians’ agenda.

ABSTRACT Prior to the enactment of the Companies Act 1948, the ability of British company directors to largely determine the nature and form of the corporate financial statements published by their company, renders the information provided in those statements highly problematic. Of particular concern were the ability to hide transactions affecting reserve account balances and the lack of any legal requirement for companies which owned subsidiaries to present consolidated accounts. In the light of the problems and pitfalls identified previously in the literature, this study analyses the usefulness of reported profit figures as a means of measuring company performance, through an examination of the published financial statements of the conglomerate manufacturing firm, Birmingham Small Arms Co. Ltd., between 1911 and 1936. Although the analysis, which utilises internal accounting records, suffers from the usual problems associated with a single case study, it does complement earlier findings, thereby extending our understanding of the extent to which directors of British conglomerate companies manipulated corporate financial statements in the interwar years.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ABSTRACT This study deciphers provocative features of the Achaemenid Empire’s accounting system. In particular, it investigates the accounting and bookkeeping mechanisms, practised in that era (in what is present-day Iran), and the major social and physical duality characteristics of these mechanisms. The research employs the techniques of summative content analysis to examine accounting clay-tablets found in the fortifications of the Persepolis. The tablets date back to the thirteenth to the twenty-eighth year (509–494 BCE) of the rule of Darius the Great of the Achaemenid Empire. The findings reveal the development of an elaborate accounting system that represented physical duality (transfer of actual physical commodities in the scheme of input-output analysis) as well as social duality (transfer of ownership, investing and/or lending and borrowing within the input-output system). The use of tokens to record, classify, and analyse accounts, to establish control and accountability, and to allocate resources suggests that our present-day systems are grounded in the knowledge transmission of earlier eras.

ABSTRACT To orthodox Marxists socialism means central planning. Capitalist accounting is, however, integral to Marx’s socialism that envisages universal worker co-operatives, initially accountable to workers and society for value, but with the interim aim of increasing the ‘productive forces’ to make every labour hour ‘directly’ of equal social value. This study tests the implication that implementing Marx’s socialism requires understanding capitalist accounting by examining its role in the Russian revolution. Lenin failed, it argues, because he did not understand capitalist accounting, Marx’s explanation of it, or his interim aim. Lenin stressed accounting’s centrality, but equated it with budgeting, and confused Marx’s interim aim with Day 1, which led him to support ‘centralisation’ and ‘workers’ control’. Lenin admitted a ‘mistake’ in 1921 when he had understood, apparently intuitively, the necessity of accountability for profit, which underlay his ‘New Economic Policy’, the reintroduction of double-entry bookkeeping in 1922, and his 1923 vision of socialism built from co-operatives. Lenin failed to overcome his comrades’ orthodoxy, and after his death in 1924 Stalin dropped his ideas, which the study hypothesises had important implications for twentieth-century geopolitical history.

ABSTRACT During the First Republic (1889–1930), also known as the Old Republic, and the Provisional Government of Getúlio Vargas (1930–1934), Brazilian public sector accounting institutions underwent a phase of accelerated reforms. This study examines how budgetary imbalances, political interference in the ways of calculating the budget results, and foreign loan negotiations affected these reforms. We analyse primary and secondary sources to establish the link between the reforms of accounting institutions, budgetary policy, and foreign loan negotiations. The analysis is qualitative and instrumentally employs the concepts of institutions and public accountability. We utilise quantitative data to provide a picture of the Brazilian fiscal context. The collected evidence indicates that the financing of coffee stocks gave rise to the reinforcement of the double-entry bookkeeping method in the State of São Paulo in 1906. It also shows that the federal fiscal imbalances required foreign financing and that the loan negotiations induced changes in the Treasury’s accounting in 1914, in the regulation of the Central Accounting Office in 1924, and in the Accounting Code in 1931. We argue that the search for calculative legitimacy for political programmes led to interference in the Central Accounting Office in 1927 and 1931, which affected the comparability of budgetary results.

Basil Yamey CBE, FBA was born on 4 May 1919 and died on 9 November 2020 at the age of 101. He was born in Cape Town, South Africa and educated at the University of Cape Town, where Professor Willia...

ABSTRACT The surplus accounts method (méthode des comptes de surplus) is an accounting technique developed by French economists from 1966 onwards, at the request of the French government. It enables a business to assess the total year-on-year gain in productivity, and can also estimate how that gain is distributed between stakeholders. Despite efforts by the State, particularly by the researchers in charge of introducing the method, support from the French professional organisation for accountants, the Ordre des Experts-Comptables, and many academics, and the usefulness of the information that it was able to produce, the surplus accounts method failed to thrive. In this study, we aim to show how this method appeared, and the reasons why it disappeared.