Introduction

Account books from the eighteenth century are rarely presented as mysterious, opaque historical artefacts. They were ubiquitous; any archival repository in Europe or on the East Coast of the United States will hold dozens of more or less elaborate recording efforts, from the large volumes of an international merchant versed in the most arcane techniques of double-entry bookkeeping, down to the single daybook on which a rural market retailer would scribble her daily transactions. What was recorded seems equally unproblematic. In the standard economic approach, keeping accounts was a self-evident imperative in a world of rational economic agents trying to maximize their profit. Focusing on double-entry accounting, Hans Derks recently summarized this view by concluding that such recording would be kept ‘to improve decision-making, to uncover gain/ loss, to track the entity's [for which the accounts were kept] rights and obligations, and to achieve a greater control or surveillance of transactions internal and external’. A detailed analysis of accounting textbooks from the early modern era by John R. Edwards, Graeme Dean and Frank Clarke Edwards, found six possible roles more or less explicitly given to private accounts: establishing one's financial position, measuring overall profitability and the resulting changes in capitalization, tracking the main components of the stock of goods traded, valuing them, computing the profit or loss on each of them and providing prospective information which would reduce uncertainty in decision-making.