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

Marketing the past over the long run: uses of the past in French accounting textbooks, 17th-19th c.

“…From a knowledge used to keep track of past accounts and describe the present as the result of past transactions, one moves to a knowledge, which can be used to break with past mistakes and improve future performance. This is very similar to what one can find in English-speaking textbooks roughly over the same period (Gervais, 2020). Accounting knowledge would at first be a mapping of the reality of accounts and not even a necessarily interested one and would then move on to a focus on performance assessment and the possibility of improving the practices for which accounts are drawn up.…”

“…From the early nineteenth century on, in France at least (it may be that the same evolution took place in Great Britain a few decades earlier, at the end of the eighteenth century, see Gervais, 2020), there was a major shift in all three directions. First, far from underpinning a collective identity of learned authors, the past became a foil against which this same community was built.…”

“…The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were studied by Lemarchand, whose chronology includes less than 20 works per century. The orders of magnitude are similar for Great Britain, with about double the number of titles (Edwards et al , 2009; Gervais, 2020) and a pace of publishing rather picking up in the eighteenth century, contrary to what happened in France, where new editions of the most successful works from the end of the seventeenth century seem to have limited the possibility for new works to be published (Lemarchand, 2001).…”

“…To offer as rigorous as possible a path of verification to the reader, we added the complete list of quotes considered significant for each author we decided to discuss in the paper to the data set referenced in Table 2; the reader can find these quotes by clicking on the hyperlink and downloading the data set. In other words, modeling our effort on similar ones in the history of accounting (Edwards, 2009; Gervais, 2020), we merely tried to gather a sufficiently significant selection of quotes from our corpus so that we could contrast convincingly overall patterns in the way the past was used as a sales pitch by all these works. The point is to determine whether the mobilization of the uses of the past as a marketing tool can indeed be seen as dominated by larger trends, beyond individual observed cases.…”

The paranoid style in the sociology of financial reporting principles

“…The last century or so has seen increasing separation of corporate ownership and control, raising the salience of passive investors as users of corporate reports (Zeff, 2013) and of the use of those reports for investment decision-making (Edwards et al , 2009; Gervais, 2020). It is surely to be expected that a service-oriented discipline like accounting would adapt its principles accordingly.…”