Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism
by Richard Brooks · 23 Apr 2018 · 398pp · 105,917 words
the Catholic Church (which had a few things to say on the vexed question of making money) came together to transform accounting. A system of ‘double-entry bookkeeping’ enabled traders to measure their performance and gauge their financial position at any given time. By recording assets and liabilities such as stocks and debts
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, and then industrialization, on an ever greater scale. Some early-twentieth-century thinkers went so far as to ascribe the rise of capitalism itself to double-entry bookkeeping. When he coined the term ‘Protestant work ethic’ in 1904, the German philosopher Max Weber also wrote: ‘The most generous presupposition for the existence of
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all large industrial undertakings which are concerned with the provision of everyday wants.’3 The ‘capital accounting’ to which he referred was in fact the double-entry bookkeeping system, which introduced the concept of ‘capital’ as the measure of an owner’s interest in an enterprise (centuries before Karl Marx expounded his theory
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calculus’, which itself ‘powerfully propels the logic of enterprise’. Another German economist, Werner Sombart, was more categorical still. ‘It is impossible to imagine capitalism without double-entry bookkeeping,’ he claimed. ‘They are like form and content.’4 None of which makes accounting an unalloyed force for good, of course. By giving an impression
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entries, it has been deployed for evil. History’s most proficient accountants include slave traders and the administrators of the Holocaust. The same genius of double-entry bookkeeping that so enhanced the understanding of a business’s results could also be used to distort them. As one eighteenth-century English critic presciently observed
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interested in ensuring business was properly accounted for than in drawing a veil over its abuses. With Arthur Andersen & Co.’s accountants waving the magic double-entry bookkeeping wand to conjure false profits and spirit away losses, Enron became the ultimate accounting trick. THE GILDED PROFESSION Despite the economic risks posed by misleading
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Charlie Munger put it: ‘widespread corrupt accounting will eventually create bad long-term consequences as a sort of obverse effect from the virtue-based boost double-entry bookkeeping gave to the heyday of Venice’.36 Yet such is their ambition and lack of self-awareness that the same bean counters who were found
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methods to prove more revolutionary than in commerce, where they made possible an ingenious new way of accounting called double-entry bookkeeping.4 As economist Werner Sombart would later write of the method’s origins: ‘Double-entry bookkeeping was born out of the same spirits as the systems of Galileo and Newton, as the theories of
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, and so on. The state of an enterprise – its profits, its assets, its debts and much else – can be readily judged. The golden rule of double-entry bookkeeping is that every transaction is recorded by debiting one account, or ledger, and crediting another. That’s the ‘double-entry’. When, for example, a business
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, if all sales and purchases had been for cash, there would be 40 florins more cash in the business at the end of the year. Double-entry bookkeeping represented a huge advance on previous accounting methods. Without a handle on matters like an enterprise’s assets and liabilities, it was impossible to divide
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to mention his afterlife, was at pains to show the worthiness of his commercial success. Accounting presented the possibility of doing so, superficially at least. Double-entry bookkeeping in particular resonated with the tradition in Christianity and more ancient belief systems of balancing rights and wrongs. The new accounting method was of special
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biographer noted, he ‘was preoccupied by the thought that his very skill in making profit was sin’.7 From around 1380, Datini operated a full double-entry bookkeeping system. The main account books, the libri grande that consolidated the contemporaneous notes of his transactions into double-entry accounts, explain his diligence. Each carried
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and Angels of Paradise’, or sometimes simply ‘In the Name of God and Profit’.8 For the merchants and their bankers seeking wealth and piety, double-entry bookkeeping offered security and a certain salvation. But, one family was to discover, only if it was done properly. RENAISSANCE MEN In 1397, Giovanni di Bicci
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control freak who had spies in every corner of Florence, Cosimo understood the value of good accounting. He needed to. Banking depended on assiduously applied double-entry bookkeeping. Bills of exchange, the bread-and-butter of the business, paid slim margins. A default on one could wipe out the gains on many times
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managers in a federated structure that would work only if the results of the branches were fairly shared. The profits needed to be properly measured. Double-entry bookkeeping met these specifications ideally. It wasn’t merely a means of accounting for the Medici business. It was central to actually doing it. In his
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Benci’s management that the Medici Bank witnessed its greatest expansion and reached the peak of its earning capacity.’ Crucially, Benci was ‘thoroughly familiar with double-entry bookkeeping’.10 Under his searching accounting regime, Medici branches were required to close their ledgers and balance their accounts every year. The books would then be
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district. There, in the hub of European commerce, he had taken the opportunity to learn what had become known as the ‘Venetian’ style of accounting: double-entry bookkeeping. At the age of 49, Pacioli was ready to publish the magnum opus he had been working on for twenty years. Summa de arithmetica, geometria
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sign from which every enemy of the spiritual flees and before which all the infernal spirits justly tremble – that is, the holy cross’. An effective double-entry bookkeeping system then starts with the memorandum book, or scrapbook, in which every transaction is immediately recorded comprehensively. He gives the example of having ‘bought from
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down when impaired – was a case in point. So would be the subprime lending debacle a few centuries later. Yet, despite its susceptibility to abuse, double-entry bookkeeping as expounded by Pacioli would prove its worth. Over the coming centuries, businesses that accounted well generally prospered; those that did not failed. In the
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blind man and may meet great losses.’ Those remain some of the truest words of the past five hundred years of financial history. IMPERIAL MEASUREMENTS Double-entry bookkeeping received an enthusiastic welcome in new commercial centres as the trading world began to look west. In Antwerp, then capital of the Spanish Empire’s
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of discrete ventures – each wound up at the end of a voyage – to a continuous business with long-term shareholders from 1657, it immediately adopted double-entry bookkeeping.18 In this era, however, balanced accounting was again also used as a moral varnish. Where it had once covered mercantilism in the face of
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fuelled the slave trade.’19 Another historian captured how the great accounting innovation had been co-opted into evil: ‘Like the closet, the conventions of double-entry bookkeeping were intended to manage or contain the excess.’20 Accounting was central not just to the rise of the seventeenth century’s new trading monopolies
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currency. According to one historian, this sense of priorities showed ‘that the fundamental capital of the Bank lay in its mastery of the algebra of double-entry bookkeeping contained within these material objects’.22 The northern European accounting story had some calamities of its own, however. With symbolic balance, as in Florence all
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was really pouring it down the drain. By misrepresenting the capital it raised as income, a commercial basket case could be made to appear profitable. Double-entry bookkeeping could be manipulated to transform the image, if not the reality, of a company’s financial position. The episode was a landmark in the accounting
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painfully clear. Accounting academies sprang up across Britain, particularly in the Scottish cities, to bring what one of its champions called the ‘happy invention’ of double-entry bookkeeping to a new generation of businessmen. The Italian method, said Ayrshire maths master John Mair, was ‘very fit for improving the minds of youth, exercising
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their wit and invention, and disposing them to a close and accurate way of thinking’.1 Protestant Britain proved to be another conducive moral climate. Double-entry bookkeeping’s emphasis on observance and scientific method chimed in particular with Noncomformists. By precisely measuring a business’s affairs, it complemented the diaries and personal
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, businessmen still had to conduct their affairs correctly. ‘See’est thou a man diligent in his business?’ the Proverbs asked. ‘He shall stand before kings.’ Double-entry bookkeeping was central to that diligence. Many British industrial pioneers were avid bookkeepers. James Watt, whose steam engine propelled the Industrial Revolution, owed his commercial success
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shared between lessor and lessee, allowing the miners to prosper and Watt to invest in further improvements.2 Accounting turned innovation into real industrial progress. Double-entry bookkeeping became key to commercial success on any scale. Although Josiah Wedgwood’s tea sets and dinner plates were all the rage in Regency England, for
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. The nation’s Founding Fathers had themselves been avid bean counters. As a pre-Independence Postmaster General in the mid 1750s, Benjamin Franklin had instituted double-entry bookkeeping across the early American postal system. George Washington had kept a copy of Scottish accounting academic John Mair’s tome, Book-keeping Methodiz’d, at
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success down to his training in accounting and applying it assiduously to his early ventures. But American business still had a shorter history of using double-entry bookkeeping, no real academic tradition in the subject and consequently less professional accountancy. It was only around the turn of the twentieth century, fifty years later
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, stocks, plant and technology rights like patents – were worth in isolation. There was nothing unusual about that in an acquisition. But the extra cost, which double-entry bookkeeping dictated would be treated as acquiring an intangible asset known as ‘goodwill’, would have to be written off over the following years. Predicted future profits
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one that hit on the winning commercial formula of blending it with its core accountancy business. KING ARTHUR If Renaissance Italy was the cradle of double-entry bookkeeping and Lowland Scotland nurtured the accountancy profession, then Illinois can stake a decent claim for setting it on the path to becoming the ‘professional services
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difficult, in both established industries and emerging ones. The other, easier, way was to fiddle the numbers using the implements of deception found within the double-entry-bookkeeping toolbox. Arthur Levitt, a stock market veteran who chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1993, watched the circus from a ringside seat. ‘Too many
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be used to shift income from one year to another, smoothing out profit growth. More brazenly, fictitious sales could be created with the magic of double-entry bookkeeping. When household-appliance maker Sunbeam collapsed in 2001, it emerged that it had been selling stock to retail stores months in advance of their need
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they had under the old zaibatsu system of concentrated, opaque corporate ownership. In the absence of a strong local profession or tradition – Japan had adopted double-entry bookkeeping only a few decades before – the major firms of the US and UK were the only ones equipped for this task. They would quickly dominate
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, Australia, 2011) Micklethwaite, J., and Woolridge, A., The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, UK, 2003) Pacioli, L., The Rules of Double-Entry Bookkeeping [Particularis de Computis et Scripturis, originally published Venice 1494]. Version used by author edited by Michael Schemmann (IICPA Publications, US, 2010) Parker, R., and Yamey
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’ (BBC Radio 4 File on 4, broadcast 4 March 2014), available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03wpjjq Jenkins, J., ‘A Brief History of Double-Entry Bookkeeping’ (BBC Radio 4, broadcast 2010) NOTES AND REFERENCES PREFACE 1. Harriet Agnew, ‘KPMG to Open Mayfair Members’ Club’, Financial Times, 31 August 2015. INTRODUCTION: MEET
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25 respectively. 4. While it is clear that the rise of mathematical methods and demand from growing trade lay behind the adoption and refinement of double-entry bookkeeping in early Renaissance Italy, its genesis is a matter of doubt. The first recorded use, not long after Fibonacci’s work, by a thirteenth-century
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dirty pooling, 63 discrezione, 26, 29 Disney, 171 Dissenters, 43 dividends, 31, 39, 45 Donovan, John, 116–17 Doty, James, 260 ‘Double Irish’ scheme, 164 double-entry bookkeeping, 3–4, 6, 18, 22–41, 42–4, 96 Bank of England, 38 and Catholicism, 24–5, 26, 29, 34 Christoffels, 36 East India Company
The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations
by Jacob Soll · 28 Apr 2014 · 382pp · 105,166 words
political accountability. In 1340, the Republic of Genoa kept a large register in the central government office. It recorded the city-state’s finances through double-entry bookkeeping. Accounting brought with it a fundamentally different way of thinking about political legitimacy: Balanced books equaled not just good business but also good government. At
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has been tallied, the transaction is over, and both sides have a line drawn through them. Profit and loss are known at all times.3 Double-entry bookkeeping for capitalism can also be understood with what accountants call the fundamental accounting equation: The assets controlled by an organization are always exactly equal to
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allowed early Americans to master capitalist culture.5 Even blunter was the influential German economist Werner Sombart: “One cannot imagine what capitalism would be without double-entry bookkeeping: the two phenomena are connected as intimately as form and contents.” The Austrian American economist, political scientist, and coiner of the term “creative destruction,” Joseph
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standard practice took more than a millennium to take hold. Accounting developed slowly in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome until medieval Italians transformed it into double-entry bookkeeping, a powerful tool of profit for capitalist enterprise and government administration. For thousands of years, the ancient world was steeped in accounts, but there was
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were concerned). At the same time, the economic practices of the Roman Empire did not focus on profit and future earnings, the principal function of double-entry bookkeeping. The Mediterranean Sea sustained the Roman Empire by shipping and trade, yet there was no overarching concept or system by which all the practices of
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wealth came from trade. It was here that multipartner firms, banking, and long-distance trade developed, and with them the concepts of capitalistic profit and double-entry bookkeeping. Northern Italy was influenced by its contact with Byzantium in the east. With its emperor, its court, its currency (the nomisma), and its often
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did what the ancient Greeks, Persians, and Romans, the great Asian kingdoms, and the feudal lords could not: Without fanfare or public recognition, they invented double-entry bookkeeping, making the revolutionary leap into the calculation of profit. The only explanation for this is that Italian merchants needed double entry to calculate multipartner firms
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and so, in a demand-response process, they developed it. Although we do not know for sure who first did it, Tuscan merchants began developing double-entry bookkeeping. The records are of some debate, but the earliest recognized use of double entry appears in the documents of the ledgers of either the Rinieri
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plagued by brigands and pirates, there was nonetheless an economic boom, much of it centered in Northern Italy. By the 1340s, the Italians had invented double-entry bookkeeping, the bill of exchange, and marine insurance, and they had perfected payments by book transfer, note, and oral agreement. It was here that money
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, fearful, saint-loving, Catholic, Italian world of trade, with its connections to Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire. The Italians invented complex multipartner firms, banking, and double-entry bookkeeping, which required an iron work ethic. Datini described the work of one of his partners in Avignon, Boninsegna di Matteo, as doing nothing but read
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on an erasable blackboard or, as others did, on loose pieces of paper and in other books, long lost. Di Tacco used accounting, but without double-entry bookkeeping, he could not keep truly accurate tallies, and his calculations were not as accurate or complete as Datini’s. He used the method of basic
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now, nor have I ever understood in all my days. —PHILIP II, KING OF SPAIN, 1574 It is ironic that the first printed manual on double-entry bookkeeping appeared at the moment Italian power in Europe began to collapse. The Dominican friar, humanist, and mathematician Luca Pacioli (1445–1517) published his Summa de
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are based in part on Pacioli’s publication, making him the central author in the history of accounting. Yet as Francesco Datini’s use of double-entry bookkeeping shows, Pacioli’s treatise came late in the game, when accounting and its culture were losing prestige. It did not become one of the great
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, art, and architecture. As a churchman and a mathematician, Pacioli believed that this great chain of being was held together by God’s language: mathematics. Double-entry bookkeeping was a very earthly but necessary mathematical method and philosophy for regulating daily financial life.1 Pacioli’s life followed a remarkable professional trajectory. Skilled
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close consultation with Pacioli on the use of perspective and proportion.3 Pacioli lived in a world in which classical humanists and political leaders valued double-entry bookkeeping as an essential form of knowledge. Quoting Virgil, Saint Paul, Saint Matthew, and Dante, Pacioli assured the reader that God will take care of
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were so clearly needed. Torregrosa worked with his godson Bartolomé Salvador de Solórzano, an international merchant from Seville, to publish the first Spanish treatise on double-entry bookkeeping. Solórzano had traveled the Indies as a merchant. He had worked for the Italian merchant Giovanni Antonio Corzo Vicentelo de Leca, who had become a
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in accounting. Yet even as the Dutch mastered, popularized, and used accounting for state administration, they, too, struggled not only with the rigorous demands of double-entry bookkeeping but also with the challenges of maintaining financial and political accountability. This might be the very lesson of the Dutch Golden Age: Those who wanted
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republic’s leading city and the center of world trade.5 Amsterdam also became the world center of accounting expertise. One poet later wrote that double-entry bookkeeping was the secret to Dutch wealth: This was the fam’d and quick invention, which Made Venice, Genoa and Florence rich: The Low-Countries (
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when they were full and not at regular intervals (which allowed for more systematic management control). Nonetheless, Ympyn’s manual became an important conduit of double-entry bookkeeping in Dutch, English, French, and German.11 Other influential mathematicians, such as Valantijn Mennher and Claes Pietersz, also followed Pacioli in combining the teaching of
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to Knowledge (1596).12 The notion that the Netherlands was the center of world commerce and that this dominance was founded on the mastery of double-entry bookkeeping is suggested by the famous German woodcut, Allegory to Commerce (first published in 1585) by the German printer, calligrapher, and accounting teacher Johann Neudörfer
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and a lowborn (indeed, bastard) engineer would meet at a university and become friends was already a European anomaly. That Stevin would teach the prince double-entry bookkeeping was another.14 Stevin excelled in linguistics, cosmography, perspective, algebra, the study of decimal fractions, the theory of numbers, physics, navigation, and astronomy. He also
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made a careful study of double-entry bookkeeping. Stevin was a civic humanist whose achievements far surpassed those of Pacioli. His learning had practical applications, especially in the management of water, and he
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accounting. He ordered Jacques Savary, the author of many of Colbert’s trade laws, to write the The Perfect Merchant (1670), featuring a section on double-entry bookkeeping for business—part of Colbert’s Law of Commerce of 1673, which required businesses to keep double books to be regularly verified by the government
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Company attempted to do in 1774. In 1777, the accountant and mathematician Wardhaugh Thompson wrote one of the most innovative works on the application of double-entry bookkeeping to industry and alluded to the difficulties of accounting for industrial profits. Nonetheless, he noted, without accounting, there was only “guess’d-work.” Economic theorists
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a secret treatise, possibly made for the government, Claude Pâris Le Montagne stated that the only path to an “ordered Government” was financial accountability through double-entry bookkeeping. He maintained that it was to an absolutist king’s disadvantage to keep secret the “shadow finance” of private tax farmers. He warned that secrecy
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Spirit of Capitalism (1905), the sociologist Max Weber held up Benjamin Franklin as what we now recognize as a caricature of the Protestant capitalist strain. Double-entry bookkeeping was at the center of Weber’s work ethic theory, for he considered it “rational.” Weber quoted Franklin’s famous sayings that “time is money
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or not. Thus Franklin not only created a manual for keeping these accounts, with printed illustrations of how to keep them, but also explained postal double-entry bookkeeping, which was part managerial, part mathematical. In any case, it was one of the most innovative accounting manuals of all time because of its specific
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inches in height to be put on the walls of post offices—that explained all this in abridged form, with illustrations and a minimanual of double-entry bookkeeping. Thus all post offices in early America had double-entry manuals posted on their walls, with instructions on how to use them. Franklin was
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Coming of Age of Double Entry: The Giovanni Farolfi Ledger of 1299–1300,” Accounting Historians Journal 4, no. 2 (1977): 80. On Italian origins of double-entry bookkeeping, see Federigo Melis, Storia della ragioneria (Bologna: Cesare Zuffi, 1950); Federigo Melis, Documenti per la storia economica dei secoli XIII–XVI (Firenze: Olschki, 1972); Raymond
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, no. 2 (1973): 137–155. 27. De Roover, “The Development of Accounting Prior to Luca Pacioli,” 124, 122. 28. Edward Peragallo, Origin and Evolution of Double Entry Bookkeeping: A Study of Italian Practice from the Fourteenth Century (New York: American Institute Publishing Company, 1938), 4–5; Brown, Accounting and Accountants, 99; Alvaro Martinelli
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Goldberg in Journey into Accounting Thought, ed. Stewart A. Leech (London: Routledge, 2001), 217. 5. Pacioli’s text is reproduced in John B. Geijsbeek, Ancient Double-Entry Bookkeeping: Luca Pacioli’s Treatise 1494 (Denver, 1914), 33. 6. Ibid., 39. 7. Ibid.; Brown, A History of Accounting and Accountants, 40, 111. 8. Grendler,
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Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 321. 9. Pacioli citations from Geijsbeek, Ancient Double-Entry Bookkeeping, 27, 37. 10. Ibid., 41, 51–53. 11. Ibid., 41, 75. 12. Bruce G. Carruthers and Wendy Nelson Espeland, “Accounting for Rationality
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: Double-Entry Bookkeeping and the Rhetoric of Economic Rationality,” American Journal of Sociology 97, no. 1 (1991): 30–67; Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems
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Sevilla, 1503–1717 (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1996), 122. 26. Rafael Donoso Anes, “The Casa de la Contratación de Indias and the Application of the Double Entry Bookkeeping to the Sale of Precious Metals in Spain 1557–83,” Accounting, Business and Financial History 4, no. 1 (1994): 84; Rafael Donoso Anes, “Accounting for
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the Estates of Deceased Travellers: An Example of Early Spanish Double-Entry Bookkeeping,” Accounting History 7, no. 1 (2002): 80–81. 27. Donoso Anes, “Accounting for the Estates of Deceased Travellers,” 84. 28. Donoso Anes, Una Contribución a
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, 2008), 201–212. 15. Bywater and Yamey, Historic Accounting Literature, 87. 16. Ibid., 16, 120; Ten Have, “Simon Stevin of Bruges,” 242, 244; Geijsbeek, Ancient Double-Entry Bookkeeping, 114; Kees Zandvliet, Maurits Prins van Oranje [Exhibition catalogue Rijksmuseum] (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam/Waanders Uitgevers Zwolle, 2000), 276–277. 17. Quotations from Barlaeus, Marie de
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Commissioners for Examining the Public Accounts 1780–1787,” Past and Present 78 (1978): 65; Henry Roseveare, The Treasury, 1660–1870, 1. 3. Yannick Lemarchand, “Introducing Double-Entry Bookkeeping in Public Finance,” Accounting, Business, and Financial History 9 (1999): 228–229. For the posters, see “Modelles des Registres Journaux que le Roy, en son
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A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1855) 2:215. 2. Hugh Coombs, John Edwards, and Hugh Greener, eds., Double-Entry Bookkeeping in British Central Government, 1822–1856 (London: Routledge, 1997), 3–5. 3. John Bowring, Report on the Public Accounts of the Netherlands (London: House of
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to Accounting History, edited by John Richard Edwards and Stephen P. Walker. Oxford: Routledge, 2009. Carruthers, Bruce G., and Wendy Nelson Espeland. “Accounting for Rationality: Double-Entry Bookkeeping and the Rhetoric of Economic Rationality.” American Journal of Sociology 97, no. 1 (1991): 30–67. Carswell, John. The South Sea Bubble. Stanford, CA: Stanford
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Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Coombs, Hugh, John Edwards, and Hugh Greener, eds. Double-Entry Bookkeeping in British Central Government, 1822–1856. London: Routledge, 1997. Cosnac, Gabriel-Jules, comte de. Mazarin et Colbert. 2 vols. Paris: Plon, 1892. Coxe, William. Memoires
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Donoso Anes, Rafael. “Accounting for the Estates of Deceased Travellers: An Example of Early Spanish Double-Entry Bookkeeping.” Accounting History 7, no. 1 (2002): 80–99. ———. “The Casa de la Contratación de Indias and the Application of the Double Entry Bookkeeping to the Sale of Precious Metals in Spain 1557–83.” Accounting, Business and Financial History
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of 1929. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2000. Gallatin, Albert. Sketch of the Finances of the United States. New York, 1796. Geijsbeek, John B. Ancient Double-Entry Bookkeeping: Luca Pacioli’s Treatise 1494. Denver, 1914. Gelderblom, Oscar. “The Governance of Early Modern Trade: The Case of Hans Thijs, 1556-1611.” Enterprise and Society
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, et finances publiques: Une expérience d’introduction de la partie double sous la Régence.” Politiques et Management Public 18, no. 2 (2000): 93–118. ———. “Introducing Double-Entry Bookkeeping in Public Finance.” Accounting, Business, and Financial History 9 (1999): 225–254. Lesger, Clé. The Rise of the Amsterdam Market and Information Exchange: Merchants, Commercial
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Books.” Virginia Quarterly Review 64, no. 4 (1988): 686–694. Pepys, Samuel. Diary of Samuel Pepys. www.pepysdiary.com. Peragallo, Edward. Origin and Evolution of Double Entry Bookkeeping: A Study of Italian Practice from the Fourteenth Century. New York: American Institute, 1938. Perrot, Jean-Claude. “Nouveautés: L’économie politique et ses livres.” In
Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World - and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet
by Jane Gleeson-White · 14 May 2011 · 274pp · 66,721 words
. It was perfected by the merchants of Venice and became known as bookkeeping alla viniziana: the Venetian method. We know it today as double-entry bookkeeping. The ‘father’ of double-entry bookkeeping was a Franciscan monk born near Florence in the 1440s. His name was Luca Pacioli. In 1494 he published the first printed treatise on
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a celebrated warrior and statesman, Washington was a successful entrepreneur who scrupulously recorded every business transaction of his farming, manufacturing and real estate empire with double-entry bookkeeping. Passed over for two hundred years in favour of his letters and diaries, Washington’s extensive accounts speak volumes about his life and times—but
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the Florentine merchants Rinieri Fini & Brothers (1296–1305) and those of Giovanni Farolfi & Co. (1299–1300). The Farolfi ledger displays the six essential features of double-entry bookkeeping as outlined by accounting historian G.A. Lee: first, the idea of a proprietor or business partnership as an accounting entity whose books record its
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Italy so soon after the arrival of Hindu–Arabic numerals is provocative, and provides an alternative to the commonly given explanation for the emergence of double-entry bookkeeping in Europe around 1300—which is that it was the result of a phenomenal expansion in commercial activity, particularly in thirteenth-century Florence. This usual
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shaken by a renaissance in mathematics and a communications revolution which both bore directly on the staying power of double entry itself. Luca Pacioli’s double-entry bookkeeping treatise Particularis de computis et scripturis (‘Particulars of Reckonings and Writings’) was published in his mathematical encyclopaedia in Venice in 1494, forty years after
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Geometry, Proportion and Proportionality’). And a plaque erected in 1878 on a building opposite the Civic Museum honours both his achievements in algebra, geometry and double-entry bookkeeping, and his friendships with two giants of the Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci. But Sansepolcro is more famous today as the birthplace
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widely read and referenced. The most innovative Dutch writer on bookkeeping was the celebrated mathematician, engineer, inventor and bureaucrat Simon Stevin (1548–1620), who learnt double-entry bookkeeping as an apprentice in Antwerp. Stevin became minister of finances and chief engineer of the Netherlands, as well as the tutor and advisor to its
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and controversial challenge. Fittingly, it came from the new economic engine of the industrial age: England. By the end of the nineteenth century, Pacioli’s double-entry bookkeeping had dropped its ‘Italian-style’ epithet, gone global and morphed into a brand-new profession: accounting. What fired this profound transformation? Essentially, the industrial
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By 1900, most businesses across the planet, even late adopters like the Rothschild banks, were keeping their books in Pacioli’s double entry. But before double-entry bookkeeping could become entrenched in modern business and spawn a profession, it faced a major theoretical challenge from Europe’s new hub of commercial activity. The
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cash-flow problems and an accumulation of stock, ‘classic symptoms of uncontrolled expansion with insufficient capital resources’. In response, in 1772 Wedgwood decided to use double-entry bookkeeping to undertake a rigorous and comprehensive examination of his firm’s accounts and business practices. The results of his endeavours proved to be enlightening. He
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in the new industrial world, Wedgwood had uncovered the commercial benefits of mass production. This is one of the earliest instances of the use of double-entry bookkeeping to analyse business accounts and apply the financial information thus extracted to guide business strategy and decision-making in the new industrial world. Now known
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by the new industrial business conditions created by the factory system and is an early example of the way in which the industrial revolution transformed double-entry bookkeeping. (The fortune Wedgwood made from his pioneering venture into cost accounting and rigorously managed pottery works was well used: in 1831 it helped to
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and tools—to the cost of the manufactured product. Of the two pioneering publications, Payen’s was the more successful: he almost managed to adapt double-entry bookkeeping to manufacturing accounts. The difficulty lay in the fact that the transactions needed to incorporate the manufacturing of products into the existing double-entry system
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work through the manufacturing processes which converted labour and raw materials into commodities. Not only did a new form of production—factories—challenge and alter double-entry bookkeeping from the 1770s, but the financing and managing of the vast investments required to build railways during the same period of industrial expansion brought new
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the need to make this distinction in order to calculate dividends became one driving force behind the international adoption of double-entry bookkeeping. Or, as Littleton put it, ‘Italian double-entry bookkeeping, already well developed and in a sense awaiting its destiny’ provided the mechanism for separating capital and income, and therefore for calculating profit, ‘under
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business empires. Rockefeller started out as a bookkeeper and attributed his vast wealth and the success of his company, Standard Oil, to his mastery of double-entry bookkeeping, especially cost accounting. The Institute of Accountants and Bookkeepers of New York (IABNY) was formed in 1882 and the American Association of Public Accountants (
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professor’s chair. In 1914 Professor John B. Geijsbeek published the first English translation of Luca Pacioli’s bookkeeping treatise in the United States—Ancient Double-Entry Bookkeeping: Luca Pacioli’s treatise—for his students and for all American accountants, believing that ‘they who wish to obtain knowledge of any science must first
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from the capital account, says Pacioli, ‘you may always learn what your fortune is’. It is likely that the concept of capitalism also came from double-entry bookkeeping. French sociologist Eve Chiapello argues that social scientists must have consulted nineteenth-century account books when conceiving the idea of capitalism, because its definition is
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intimately tied to the categories and practices of double entry. One of the first to tap the theoretical possibilities of the language and concepts of double-entry bookkeeping was Karl Marx, who had a special and little-known interest in the bookkeeping activities of nineteenth-century Britain. According to Chiapello, Marx could
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practices of his day, because his representation of capital corresponds in every way to its use in nineteenth-century double-entry bookkeeping. If she is right—and her argument is persuasive—then the double-entry bookkeeping practices of industrial Britain made a significant contribution to Marx’s definition of capital and therefore to Sombart’s definition
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Marx (and Marx’s family) during his long years in the British Library in London researching Das Kapital. In fact, British factories guided by Venetian double-entry bookkeeping directly funded two of the great revolutionary thinkers of the nineteenth century: Charles Darwin (through his grandfather Josiah Wedgwood’s Etruria pottery works), and Karl
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every movement throughout the company’s capital cycle, quantifying it and recording it in writing’. Sombart calls Pacioli’s treatise ‘the first scientific system for double-entry bookkeeping in which all previous empirical discoveries were theorized into a coherent, comprehensive representation’. The last two stages of bookkeeping’s development came with the publication
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of Simon Stevin’s accounting book in 1605 and the introduction of stocktaking in closing procedures. According to Sombart, capitalism originated with double-entry bookkeeping, which created the category of capital—or ‘that amount of wealth which is used in making profits and which enters into the accounts’. Not content
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suggesting that double entry itself was the germ of the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century: ‘Without looking too closely one might already glimpse in double-entry bookkeeping the ideas of gravitation, the circulation of blood and energy conservation.’ What Sombart means by this extravagant claim is that through its encouragement of regular
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the entire modern scientific capitalist world. In particular, he says that by enabling a numerical, monetary (and hence, in his view, ‘rational’) calculation of profit, double-entry bookkeeping provided the basis on which commerce could be seen as a process of acquisition: as an unending, systematic pursuit of profit. This claim might seem
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the explicit pursuit of profit and the accumulation of wealth by merchants, then this would help to explain why the cities of northern Italy, where double-entry bookkeeping first appeared in Europe, amassed such stupendous riches in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The fact that their rulers—the Medici of Florence, Ludovico Sforza
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all large industrial undertakings which are concerned with provision of everyday wants.’ Weber’s definition of a ‘capitalistic enterprise’ is derived from the concepts of double-entry bookkeeping: ‘a rational capitalistic establishment is one with capital accounting’. Like Sombart, Weber argues that double entry is significant because it makes possible an abstract measure
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rule ‘perhaps until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt’. The economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) also traces the development of capitalism back to double-entry bookkeeping. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, published in 1942, Schumpeter says that capitalism adds a new edge to rationality by ‘exalting the monetary unit—not itself
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understand the appeal of Sombart’s argument, especially in light of the historical coincidence of the rise in thirteenth-century Italy of mercantile capitalism alongside double-entry bookkeeping. But detractors argue that a close reading of the historical evidence does not support Sombart’s generalisation: in fact the few merchants’ books which
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by the Roman lawyer and orator Cicero (an art, incidentally, which Aristotle says sprang from a property dispute). According to this argument, medieval merchants used double-entry bookkeeping as a rhetorical tool of capitalist propaganda, to persuade their ‘audience’ that their business was honest, morally sound and its profit-making ethically justified. Why
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War. But Evans argues that the rationale behind principlism goes back further, to 1494 and Pacioli’s De computis. He calls Pacioli’s treatise on double-entry bookkeeping ‘a major innovation in economic history’. First, because double entry provided the means of discarding all information extraneous to decision-making, leaving behind only numbers
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the calculation of profit—and which can therefore be used to measure the success of each individual transaction and of a business generally. For Evans, double-entry bookkeeping has made possible the cost-benefit thinking that plagues contemporary management, from government and corporations to health care and education. For example, it governs ‘
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role for government and a greatly restricted role for free commerce. So how do these twentieth-century capitalist revolutions relate to Luca Pacioli and Venetian double-entry bookkeeping? Both Roosevelt’s programme of economic intervention and Keynes’s theory of effective demand entailed the construction of national accounting systems: both were concerned with
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1949, national accounting was ‘the application of accounting principles to an entire economic organisation’. According to Hagen, ‘national income measurement is best thought of as double-entry bookkeeping, involving the consolidation of the operating accounts of all productive enterprises in the economic system, including government’. Accounting historian Richard Mattessich expressed a similar view
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p. 17. p. 18 ‘There, following my introduction . . .’ Fibonacci, Liber abaci, Springer Publishing, New York, 2002, p. 3. p. 20 the six essential features of double-entry bookkeeping . . . G.A. Lee, ‘Farolfi Ledger 1299–1300’, The Development of Double Entry: Selected essays, Christopher W. Nobes (ed.), Garland Publishing Inc., New York, 1984. p
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what we understand . . .’ Ibid., p. 365. p. 89 ‘The science of mathematics, . . .’ Ibid, p. 320. Chapter 4 p. 92 ‘special treatise . . .’ John B. Geijsbeek, Ancient Double-Entry Bookkeeping: Luca Pacioli’s treatise, 1914, reprinted by Nihon Shoseki Ltd, Osaka, 1975, p. 15. p. 92 ‘nothing else than the . . .’ Ibid., p. 15. p. 93
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. Radcliffe and Paul A. Shoemaker (eds), Doing Accounting History: Contributions to the development of accounting thought, Elsevier Science Ltd, Oxford, 2003. Geijsbeek, John B., Ancient Double-Entry Bookkeeping: Luca Pacioli’s treatise, 1914, reprinted by Nihon Shoseki Ltd, Osaka, 1975. Gillispie, Charles Coulston (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New
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in: Denise Schmandt-Besserat’s new way of seeing’, The Austin Chronicle, 10 December 1999. Carruthers, Bruce G. and Wendy Nelson Espeland, ‘Accounting for rationality: Double-entry bookkeeping and the rhetoric of economic rationality’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 97, no. 1, July 1991, pp. 31–69. Chiapello, Eve, ‘Accounting and the
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, Karen, ‘Why golden ratio pleases the eye: US academic says he knows art secret’, Guardian, 28 December 2009. Martinelli, Alvaro, ‘Notes on the origin of double-entry bookkeeping’, Abacus, vol. 13, issue 1, 1977, pp. 3–27. Mills, Geoffrey T., ‘Early accounting in northern Italy: The role of commercial development and the
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Historians Journal, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 73–90. Online sources AccountAble, issue 6: October–December 2005, http://uttardayee.freewebspace.com/Accountable_Asia. Art: Bookkeeping, Double-entry Bookkeeping in Medieval Italy, www.franzarlinghaus.de/Bookkeeping.html. Baker, Linda, ‘GPI—GDP is killing us’, 31 May 2010, http://tangibleinfo.blogspot.com/2010/05/gpi
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’, Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Ghent University, accessed May 2009, http://logica.ugent.be/centrum/. ——‘On the curious historical coincidence of algebra and double-entry bookkeeping’, November 2009, http://logica.ugent.be/albrecht/thesis/FOTFS2008-Heeffer.pdf. Huxley, Aldous, ‘The best picture’, 1925, www.paradoxplace.com/Perspectives/Italian%20Images/Montages/Art
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/Best%20Picture%20Huxley%20Essay.pdf. Jenkins, Jolyon, ‘A brief history of double-entry bookkeeping’, BBC podcast, March 2010, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r402b. Kuznets, Simon, Nobel Prize for Economics lecture, 1971, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates
Mastering Spreadsheet Bookkeeping
by Peter Marshall · 16 Apr 2014 · 306pp · 58,984 words
Spreadsheet Bookkeeping 1 A period of transition 2 The role and significance of professional associations 3 Data security and the Data Protection Act 1998 4 Double entry bookkeeping 5 Configuring spreadsheets within the traditional daybook format 6 Speeding up traditional ledger posting 7 Depreciation calculations PART TWO Basic Spreadsheet Bookkeeping 8 Recording daily
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it is very likely that anyone who controls such data will need to register and comply with the Act. 4 Double entry bookkeeping Let’s just remind ourselves of the essential principle of double entry bookkeeping because we have to keep this in mind as we construct and use our spreadsheet system. Debit and credit Transactions
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the business is working to plan); • a cumulative total of money owed by each customer. A check on accuracy There is another important advantage of double entry bookkeeping. If both sides of each transaction have been recorded then, at any time, if the sums have been done correctly the debit entries will equal
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known as the ribbon 5 Configuring spreadsheets within the traditional daybook format This chapter contains guidance for those who are already knowledgeable and skilled in double entry bookkeeping, but not in the use of spreadsheets for the purpose. Chapters 8 to 50 give more comprehensive guidance on the whole subject of
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double entry bookkeeping and spreadsheet use. Nowadays, we can use the electronic pages of a spreadsheet program to keep the books of a business. This has great advantages.
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them. 16 The cash book: recording money paid out, step by step Posting to the credit page We need to do our first piece of double entry bookkeeping. Since the bank has been debited with the money the cashier paid in, the cashier must be credited with the same amount. Otherwise, the cashier
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and so on. These are source documents for the books of prime entry. Recording each transaction twice We have already seen how each transaction in double entry bookkeeping has two aspects: a debit and a credit. So each transaction has to be recorded in two separate places, on the debit side and on
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, 44, 63, 64 posting 61, 64–5 trade discounts 31, 33, 35, 38, 63 and VAT 64 distribution costs 110 dividends 107, 289, 291, 302 double entry bookkeeping 7, 58, 113 drawings 57, 82, 84, 92, 93, 95, 127 drawings account summary 178 E&OE 27, 36 early settlement discount 40, 43, 44
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, 57–62, 66, 68, 69, 70, 76, 77, 78, 89, 108, 113 abridged list of ledger accounts 114, 114 balancing 41–2, 52–3, 62 double entry bookkeeping 58 folio columns 62 listing of ledger balances see trial balance master record 57 posting from books of prime entry 58 posting from the cash
Bookkeeping the Easy Way
by Wallace W. Kravitz · 30 Apr 1990
of small businesses. Understanding basic bookkeeping procedures is vital to developing an understanding of more advanced accounting theory and practice. Therefore, mastering the concepts of double-entry bookkeeping is a prerequisite to any further study. This text is designed to be used in a variety of ways, depending on the need of the
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account Debit (dr.) entries on the left side of any account Ledger all accounts, taken together as a group, for the same individual or business Double-Entry Bookkeeping a method of bookkeeping in which, for every transaction, the amounts debited must equal the amounts credited (Debits = Credits) T-Account an accountant's device
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or more account balances, the fundamental bookkeeping/accounting equation will always be in balance: A = L + OE. This is the explanation of the theory of DOUBLE-ENTRY BOOKKEEPING: for every transaction debits always equal credits. < previous page page_25 next page > < previous page page_26 next page > Page 26 Reexamine in T-accounts
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) 5000 Notice that each numbered transaction identifies a debit and a credit of equal amount. This is helpful in order to follow the system of double-entry bookkeeping. For every transaction, debits must equal credits. YOU SHOULD REMEMBER In every transaction debits equal credits. Assets increase by debits and decrease by credits. Liabilities
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. Know Your Vocabulary Use each of the following words or terms in a statement relating to bookkeeping/accounting: Account form Balance Credit (cr.) Debit (dr.) Double-entry bookkeeping Ledger Rules of debits and credits T-account Questions 1. Which of the following statements is true? a) For every transaction, the account(s) debited
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is a single-entry procedure, not requiring a debit and credit for each transaction. It should not, however, be used as a substitute for a double-entry bookkeeping system. The following is an illustration of a cashbook used by Christine Ghent for her household records: < previous page page_95 next page > < previous page
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indicated above.As can be seen, a program is the key to how a computer spreadsheet is used, not only for single-entry records, but double-entry bookkeeping records, too. < previous page page_210 next page > < previous page page_211 next page > Page 211 YOU SHOULD REMEMBER A combination journal replaces special journals
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of, 25-26 Decreasing accounts, 10-11 Deposit in transit, 94 Detail audit tape, 147, 152 Direct ledger bookkeeping, 39 Disbursement, petty cash, 101-103 Double-entry bookkeeping, 23, 25-26 Drawee, 91 Drawer, 91 Drawing: account, 31-32, 199 checks, 93 E Eight-column work sheet, 171-182 Ending date, 56 Endorsement
A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order
by Judith Flanders · 6 Feb 2020 · 404pp · 110,942 words
1947 as ‘a key transitional event in the advent of the information age’. Other key moments, according to historians, include the invention of writing, of double-entry bookkeeping, printing, the telegraph and the computer. What is notable in this list is that none of these are inventions that created new knowledge themselves, but
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alongside liabilities, where suppliers were distinguished from customers and, importantly, where a single client, shipment or purchase could be located with ease. The solution was double-entry bookkeeping, a method whereby each transaction is entered at least twice, as a credit or as a debit, in separate columns which must, at the end
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with Leonardo da Vinci), published a textbook on mathematics and geometry that included a chapter entitled De computis et scripturis, On Computation and Writing, describing double-entry bookkeeping as it was practised at that period. Within a few years the chapter was published separately as an instructional pamphlet, translated into English, German, French
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’, suggesting that the clerks were expected to create an alphabetic index rather than ordering the entries themselves alphabetically.12 For our purposes, the significance of double-entry bookkeeping is that it is a system that takes an undifferentiated mass of small units – in this case business transactions – and systematizes and arranges them so
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others. In his work as a senior naval clerk, Pepys relied on his own modified version of the commonplace method – and, in a way, of double-entry bookkeeping – jotting entries in a notebook as events transpired before, at the end of each day, transferring them to separate ledgers depending on their content: account
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forward when deus no longer meant only ‘God’ but also the letters d-e-u-s, which could be rearranged and reordered at will, as double-entry bookkeeping had taken concrete transactions and rendered them into abstract units in the debit and credit columns, so too books had become units to be manipulated
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-press produces the first printed book in Western Europe early 1460s The first printed index, to the works of Augustine, appears 1494 A book on double-entry bookkeeping spreads the practice across Europe 1499 The first book with indented paragraphs printed by Aldus Manutius, followed by italic type and books with pagination on
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ref1, ref2 builders’ reference marks ref1 bureaucracy ref1, ref2, ref3 accounts ref1, ref2, ref3n in antiquity ref1, ref2 archives see archives charters ref1, ref2, ref3 double-entry bookkeeping ref1, ref2, ref3n filing ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 hanging or vertical files ref1 lever-arch files (ring binders) ref1, ref2 with string ref1
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reference works distinctiones ref1, ref2 Doderer, Heimito von ref1 Domesday Book ref1, ref2 Dominicans ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Dondi, Giovanni ref1 Doni, Anton Francesco ref1fn double-entry bookkeeping ref1, ref2, ref3n Dumas, Louis ref1, ref1 Dunn, James Newton ref1 Dyer, Sir James ref1 education ref1 children’s picture books ref1 commonplace books, role
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, ref3, ref4, ref5 chronological order ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14 donor order ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4n double-entry bookkeeping ref1, ref2, ref3n genealogical order ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 geographical order ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5fn, ref6 hierarchical order ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Mastering Book-Keeping: A Complete Guide to the Principles and Practice of Business Accounting
by Peter Marshall · 1 Feb 1997
in a box and takes them along to an accountant. Little wonder accountants call these ‘shoebox jobs’. Invariably some documents have been lost, so normal double entry bookkeeping is impossible. A way has to be found to fill in all the gaps. The capital comparison method One method is to draw up an
The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey · 27 Feb 2018 · 348pp · 97,277 words
having to trust a courier who might well steal it. The solution came with the advent of a new form of ledger-keeping known as double-entry bookkeeping, an approach that was pioneered, as we’ll discuss lower down, by a clique of Renaissance bankers. In adopting this bookkeeping, they thrust banking into
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class and for centuries was the preeminent source for mathematical knowledge in Europe. But something equally important also happened around this time: Europeans learned of double-entry bookkeeping, picking it up from the Arabians, who’d been using it since the seventh century. Merchants in Florence and other Italian cities began applying these
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—Pacioli’s Summa would become a kind of self-help book for the merchant class. That a member of the clergy took an interest in double-entry bookkeeping was important, because Pacioli’s method helped the merchants overcome the church’s disdain for usury. The merchants had to prove to the church that
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class was able to perform a trick that had eluded them for a millennium: making it acceptable to engage in the business of making loans. Double-entry bookkeeping, Aho writes, “was itself complicit in the invention of a new ‘field of visibility’: the Christian merchant.” This deliberate connection between biblical records and accounting
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important, they also established the 500-year practice of bankers creating an essential role for themselves as society’s centralized trust bearers. The value of double-entry bookkeeping, therefore, wasn’t merely in dry efficiency. The ledger came to be viewed as a kind of moral compass, whose use conferred moral rectitude on
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troubled banks did, and you end up out of business. Our goal here is not to trash double-entry bookkeeping or the banks. Were we to, you know, add up all the debits and credits, double-entry bookkeeping has done more good than harm. The goal really is to show the deep historical and cultural roots
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, Grigg believed it would lead to a programmable record-keeping system that would make fraud virtually impossible. In a nutshell, the concept took the existing, double-entry bookkeeping system and added a third book: the independent, open ledger that’s secured by cryptographic methods so that no one can change it. Grigg saw
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one, when we talked about triple-entry bookkeeping. Let’s think about what that means for a particular industry built on the existing system of double-entry bookkeeping: accountants. The Big Four accounting firms—Deloitte, Price Waterhouse, Ernst Young, and KPMG—seem to be taking an “if-you-can’t-fight-them-join
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(MIT) digital rights management (DRM) distributed denial of service (DDOS) distributed ledger technology distributed trust systems and protocol domain name system (DNS) dot-com bubble double-entry bookkeeping. See also ledger-keeping double-spending Draper, Adam Draper, Bill Draper, Tim Draper, William H. Draper Fisher Jurvetson Dryja, Thaddeus DTCC. See Depository Trust & Clearing
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Jordan Juniper Research K320 (digital currency) Kalanick, Travis Kickstarter. See also crowdfunding know-your-customer (KYC) know-your-machine Larimer, Daniel ledger-keeping and Bitcoin double-entry bookkeeping history of triple-entry bookkeeping value of Lehman Brothers Lemieux, Victoria L. Leondrino Exchange Lessig, Lawrence Levine, Matt Lewis, Michael Lightning Network Linux Foundation Litecoin
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
by Ron Chernow · 1 Jan 1997 · 1,106pp · 335,322 words
cities. The Cleveland branch occupied the top floor of the Rouse Building, the town’s premier office building, which overlooked the Public Square. It taught double-entry bookkeeping, clear penmanship, and the essentials of banking, exchange, and commercial law—the sort of purposeful courses that appealed to John. By the time his studies
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organization.36 For Joseph Schumpeter, capitalism “turns the unit of money into a tool of rational cost-profit calculations, of which the towering monument is double-entry bookkeeping.”37 It thus seems fitting that John D. Rockefeller, the archetypal capitalist, betrayed a special affinity for accounting and an almost mystic faith in numbers
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’ and ‘save all they can,’ will likewise ‘give all they can,’ then the more they will grow in grace.”75 Rockefeller operated by such spiritual double-entry bookkeeping, with his charity serving, in time, as incontestable proof of his fortune’s purity. It might well be that his early commitment to charity gave
The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution
by David Wootton · 7 Dec 2015 · 1,197pp · 304,245 words
impossible to understand a word of it; without these there is only clueless scrabbling around in a dark labyrinth. – Galileo, The Assayer (1623)1 § 1 Double-entry bookkeeping goes back at least to the thirteenth century. The principle of double entry is simple: every transaction is entered twice, as a credit and as
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in the abstractness or concreteness, not in geometry or physics, but in a calculator who does not know how to make a true accounting.3 Double-entry bookkeeping thus represents an attempt to make the real world, the world of bolts of silk, bales of wool and bags of sugar, mathematically legible. The
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geometrical principles of perspective representation.4 Galileo’s own mathematics teacher, Ostilio Ricci, taught perspective to painters. Perspective painting was a more recent invention than double-entry bookkeeping. It began sometime between 1401 and 1413 when Filippo Brunelleschi produced a most peculiar work of art.5 The object itself no longer survives; we
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Compendium of Arithmetic, Geometry, Proportions and Proportionality (1494). This was a textbook of applied mathematics, and included within it was the first published account of double-entry bookkeeping – double entry was not new, but printing was, so Pacioli was taking advantage of an obvious opportunity.33 § 4 Perspective painting generally involves a peculiar
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, it is the only one of the ten numerals that is Arabic; the others are Indian). Arabic numerals made possible the paper-based accounting of double-entry bookkeeping. Zeros are wonderfully useful, even if deeply mysterious; perhaps only a culture which had the number zero could have made sense of the idea that
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, and if we want to trace the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution we will need to go back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to double-entry bookkeeping, to Alberti and Regiomontanus. The Scientific Revolution was, first and foremost, a revolt by the mathematicians against the authority of the philosophers. The philosophers controlled
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the numbers right. Merchants had been making and losing money since time immemorial. The idea that accurate figures could make a fundamental difference started with double-entry bookkeeping in the thirteenth century; it then spread to the sciences, and outwards from both accountancy and science to government. In 1662, for example, John Graunt
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the Powder of Sympathy’. British Journal for the History of Science 41 (2008): 161–85. Heeffer, Albrecht. ‘On the Curious Historical Coincidence of Algebra and Double-entry Bookkeeping’. In Foundations of the Formal Sciences VII. Ed. K François, B Löwe and T Müller. London: College Publishers, 2011: 109–30. Heilbron, John L. Galileo
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. 32. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-century Italy (1972). 33. Gleeson-White, Double Entry (2011). I hope to return elsewhere to the influence of double-entry bookkeeping on ideas of rationality in the early modern period. 34. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (1991), 143: translating Palladio, Panofsky remarks that ‘orizzonte . . . in the
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Inquiry (2000); Stanford, Exceeding Our Grasp (2010). Mathematics provides an interesting case study. Against path dependency, Heeffer, ‘On the Curious Historical Coincidence of Algebra and Double-entry Bookkeeping’ (2011); but Pascal seems to have reinvented Euclidean geometry from scratch, and Srinivasa Ramanujan reinvented much of modern mathematics, although he also produced numerous results
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Faustus (Christopher Marlowe) 155 Doll, Richard 564 domes 77 Domesday Book 484 Dominicans 100 Donne, John 7–10, 124, 208, 217 Dorchester, Marquis of 296n double-entry bookkeeping 163–4, 177, 260 Dover harbour 32 Dream of Scipio (Cicero) 118 Drebbel, Conrad 441 Dryden, John 41, 454 Duchess of Malfi, The (John Webster
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The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found: A History in Seven Cities
by Violet Moller · 21 Feb 2019
Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
by Douglas Rushkoff · 1 Jun 2009 · 422pp · 131,666 words
The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality
by Oded Galor · 22 Mar 2022 · 426pp · 83,128 words
Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 27 Nov 2012 · 651pp · 180,162 words
Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time
by James Suzman · 2 Sep 2020 · 909pp · 130,170 words
Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America
by Dan Conway · 8 Sep 2019 · 218pp · 68,648 words
The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life
by Robert Wright · 1 Jan 1994 · 604pp · 161,455 words
Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities
by Diana Leafe Christian · 1 Jan 2003
GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History
by Diane Coyle · 23 Feb 2014 · 159pp · 45,073 words
Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More
by Charles Kenny · 31 Jan 2011 · 272pp · 71,487 words
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
by Robert Wright · 28 Dec 2010
Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott · 9 May 2016 · 515pp · 126,820 words
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
by Margaret Atwood · 15 Mar 2007
How the City Really Works: The Definitive Guide to Money and Investing in London's Square Mile
by Alexander Davidson · 1 Apr 2008 · 368pp · 32,950 words
Against Intellectual Monopoly
by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine · 6 Jul 2008 · 607pp · 133,452 words
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama · 11 Apr 2011 · 740pp · 217,139 words
The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times
by Giovanni Arrighi · 15 Mar 2010 · 7,371pp · 186,208 words
Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator
by Keith Houston · 22 Aug 2023 · 405pp · 105,395 words
The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory
by Kariappa Bheemaiah · 26 Feb 2017 · 492pp · 118,882 words
The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce · 20 Apr 2017 · 223pp · 58,732 words
Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
by Francis Fukuyama · 29 Sep 2014 · 828pp · 232,188 words
The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson · 23 Sep 2019 · 809pp · 237,921 words
Finding Zero: A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers
by Amir D. Aczel · 6 Jan 2015 · 204pp · 60,319 words
The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume
by Josh Kaufman · 2 Feb 2011 · 624pp · 127,987 words
The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy
by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley · 10 Jun 2013
Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity
by Francis Fukuyama · 1 Jan 1995 · 585pp · 165,304 words
The Crux
by Richard Rumelt · 27 Apr 2022 · 363pp · 109,834 words
After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead
by Alan S. Blinder · 24 Jan 2013 · 566pp · 155,428 words
Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar · 2 Nov 2021
Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism
by John Elkington · 6 Apr 2020 · 384pp · 93,754 words
From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
by Daniel C. Dennett · 7 Feb 2017 · 573pp · 157,767 words
The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis
by Martin Wolf · 24 Nov 2015 · 524pp · 143,993 words
The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World
by Tim Harford · 1 Jan 2008 · 250pp · 88,762 words
The Hacker's Diet
by John Walker
The Inequality Puzzle: European and US Leaders Discuss Rising Income Inequality
by Roland Berger, David Grusky, Tobias Raffel, Geoffrey Samuels and Chris Wimer · 29 Oct 2010 · 237pp · 72,716 words
The Medical Detectives
by Berton Roueche · 1 Jan 1980 · 421pp · 147,305 words
Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
by Rebecca Henderson · 27 Apr 2020 · 330pp · 99,044 words
The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world
by Michael Pollan · 27 May 2002 · 273pp · 83,186 words
Scarcity: The True Cost of Not Having Enough
by Sendhil Mullainathan · 3 Sep 2014 · 305pp · 89,103 words
These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means
by Christopher Summerfield · 11 Mar 2025 · 412pp · 122,298 words
Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth
by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato · 31 Jul 2016 · 370pp · 102,823 words
How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means
by John Lanchester · 5 Oct 2014 · 261pp · 86,905 words
When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe · 3 Oct 2022 · 689pp · 134,457 words
Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears
The Post-American World: Release 2.0
by Fareed Zakaria · 1 Jan 2008 · 344pp · 93,858 words
The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations
by David Pilling · 30 Jan 2018 · 264pp · 76,643 words
Social Life of Information
by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid · 2 Feb 2000 · 791pp · 85,159 words
How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance
by Parag Khanna · 11 Jan 2011 · 251pp · 76,868 words
The omnivore's dilemma: a natural history of four meals
by Michael Pollan · 15 Dec 2006 · 467pp · 503 words
I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay
by John Lanchester · 14 Dec 2009 · 322pp · 77,341 words
The Rules of Work, Expanded Edition: A Definitive Code for Personal Success (The Rules by Richard Templar)
by Richard Templar · 26 Sep 2002
The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life
by Sahil Bloom · 4 Feb 2025 · 363pp · 94,341 words