Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction: The Many Scales of Merchant Profit: Accounting for Norms, Practices and Results in the Age of Commerce
- Part I Understanding Merchant Transactions
- 1 The Current Account as Cognitive Artefact: Stories and Accounts of la Maison Chaurand
- 2 Why Profit and Loss Didn't Matter: The Historicized Rationality of Early Modern Merchant Accounting
- Part II The Credit Nexus and its Pitfalls
- Part III Beyond Price Signals: The Institutional Framework
- Part IV Diversification and Risk Management
- Conclusion: Reorienting Early Modern Economic History: Merchant Economy, Merchant Capitalism and the Age of Commerce
- Notes
- Index
1 - The Current Account as Cognitive Artefact: Stories and Accounts of la Maison Chaurand
from Part I - Understanding Merchant Transactions
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction: The Many Scales of Merchant Profit: Accounting for Norms, Practices and Results in the Age of Commerce
- Part I Understanding Merchant Transactions
- 1 The Current Account as Cognitive Artefact: Stories and Accounts of la Maison Chaurand
- 2 Why Profit and Loss Didn't Matter: The Historicized Rationality of Early Modern Merchant Accounting
- Part II The Credit Nexus and its Pitfalls
- Part III Beyond Price Signals: The Institutional Framework
- Part IV Diversification and Risk Management
- Conclusion: Reorienting Early Modern Economic History: Merchant Economy, Merchant Capitalism and the Age of Commerce
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Introduction
For more than sixty years, the controversy concerning the role of double-entry bookkeeping in the emergence and expansion of capitalism, initiated by the works of Werner Sombart and Max Weber, has played itself out in the accounting literature. This debate, as noted by W. Funnell and J. Robertson, has centred primarily on developments in England to the neglect of those elsewhere. Funnell and Robertson examine Dutch and German accounting texts of the sixteenth century to test Sombart's thesis, concluding that at this time ‘a capitalistic form of double-entry bookkeeping was a curiosity in the north Netherlands, notably Amsterdam’. While in broad agreement with their argument with respect to the desirability of expanding this energetic debate to other contexts, our approach differs from their study in two significant ways: context and critique. First, our research context is the eighteenth-century French trade. Second, our story has a distinctly different angle in that we are not so much debating the adoption or non-adoption of double-entry bookkeeping to test Sombartian claims or more recently, those of R. A. Bryer. To the contrary, our analyses indeed confirm that double-entry systems were utilized and these techniques highly developed, a feature that we have confirmed in other archives of this period. Instead our preoccupation resides elsewhere: if double-entry accounting was not employed for purposes of profit determination à la Sombart, what were the purposes for its adoption and development?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Merchants and Profit in the Age of Commerce, 1680–1830 , pp. 13 - 32Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014