Accounting fundamentals and accounting change: Boulton & Watt and the Springfield Armory

Accounting and social conflict: Profit and regulated working time in the British Industrial Revolution

“…Lack of clear rules also meant that in the cotton textile industry, there was space for mill owners and social reform campaigners to interpret accounting information differently and present it subjectively to an interested 'outsider' audience, as they did in the factory reform debates. Extending the above evidence (Wells, 1978, Garner, 1954, Toms and Fleischman, 2015, it can be argued that mill owners' accounting understandings and perspectives were driven by the development of productive forces under their control. As economic growth occurs, there are opportunities to substitute capital for labour, which will create differences in the resource bases of firms within the same industry.…”

“…An asset thus embodies a specific quantity of labour, for example 'a definite quantity of labour …has been objectified in the cotton' (Marx, 1976: 296). Value creation through the labour process is at the same time a social relation, with the aim of the production of surplus value (Marx, 1976(Marx, : p.1002) such that the division of such value requires the institutional settlement of conflicting claims (Toms and Fleischman, 2015). Market price, as distinct from value, in turn represents the crystallization of value as a specific quantity of money (Marx, 1976: ch.2).…”

“…Error and subjectivity did not, however, obscure genuine progress in the theory and practice of accounting. Using the example of steam engine manufacturer, Boulton and Watt, in the period 1770-1820, Toms and Fleischman (2015) note that relatively sophisticated managerial accounting techniques evolved in response to changes in the material base, including the internalization of asset configurations and transformation of the labour process. Similarly, for contemporary theorists like Babbage, fixed cost was a consequence of mechanization, widely recognized in the railway and engineering industries (Wells, 1978: p.61), thus becoming more significant with industrialization and the increasing complexity of manufacturing (Garner, 1954).…”

The early evolution of corporate control and auditing: the English East India Company (1600-1640)

“…Accounting and auditing practice has evolved through path-dependent historical processes over thousands of years (Waymire and Basu, 2008) and has always been an integral part of governance, accountability, sustainability, and other controlling and monitoring processes or regimes (Hopwood, 1983; Cushing, 1989; Miller and Napier, 1993; Toms, 2005; Funnell and Robertson, 2011; Carnegie, 2014; Toms and Fleischman, 2015). Historical studies of the change in accounting and auditing practice are important to better understand how and why accounting and auditing “got where it is today” (Zeff, 2003, p. 189).…”

Double entry and the rise of capitalism: keeping a sense of proportion?

“…This might seem a nuanced point, but do we conclude that DEB gives rise to capitalism as suggested by Sombart (1915) andBryer (2005), or that it is down to the factors that Dean, Clarke and Capalbo (2016) A counter argument that accommodates the dimensions of capitalist mentality and industrial organisation introduced by Dean, Clarke and Capalbo (2016) is the view that accounting and accounting change are the effects, rather than the causes of capitalist, or indeed any other form of economic development. According to this view, accounting evolves in response to the development of the asset base and changes in capital ownership (Toms 2010, Toms & Fleischman 2015, and in that sense could be described as a proportionate phenomenon in history.…”