On the social history of accounting : The bank audit
- Authors: West, Brian
- Date: 2001
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Accounting History Vol. 6 , no. 1 (2001), p. 20-30
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: The processes of social negotiation which sanction the elevated occupational authority of professions remain understudied. However, the conventionally ascribed complexity of professional services suggests the importance of more discursive mediums rather than objective evaluations of occupational competence. Thus, what might previously have been dismissed as mere professional ephemera may actually function as key signifiers in the development of image and status. It is within this context that Bruce Marshall’s 1958 book The Bank Audit is reviewed. Authored by an accountant, this book is significant as a rare example of an “accounting novel” and for its often distinctive portrayal of accountants and their work. A call is made for accounting historians to enliven development of the social history of accounting by searching for and studying the expansive and eclectic range of texts and other sources which elucidate the often intriguing interface between this occupation and the broader society in which it is constituted.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003002504
Accounting and the history of the everyday life of captains, sailors and common seamen in eighteenth-century Portuguese slave trading
- Authors: Pinto, Ofelia , West, Brian
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Accounting History Vol. 22, no. 3 (2017), p. 320-347
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This archive-based case study uses accounting and related records to uncover details of the everyday life of the captains, sailors and seamen who manned the ships that allowed Portuguese slave trading to flourish during the eighteenth century. By elaborating the lives of the crews of the ships of the Companhia Geral do Grão Pará e Maranhão, a Portuguese chartered company created in 1755 for the express purpose of slave trading, the study contributes to a growing body of literature that uses accounting documents as a source of social history and enables previously silent voices to be heard. Furthermore, the study brings together two notions which have previously remained separated in the accounting history literature: the everyday lives of participants within the setting of a ‘dark’ episode of human history. © 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.
Accounting, slavery and social history : The legacy of an eighteenth-century Portuguese chartered company
- Authors: Pinto, Ofelia , West, Brian
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Accounting History Vol. 22, no. 2 (2017), p. 141-166
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Based on extensive archival research, this study documents and analyses the accounting techniques that the Companhia Geral do Grão Pará e Maranhão applied to its slave trading operations during the second half of the eighteenth century. The surviving accounting records of this Portuguese chartered company reveal – in meticulous detail – the integral role that accounting technology played in enabling the slave trade to flourish. However, and paradoxically, while evidencing this culpability the same accounting records also document the essential humanity of the slaves and preserve details of the bleak circumstances of their existence. Slaves are typically lamented as a lost people consigned to a tragic and an eternal anonymity, but it is from accounting records that many aspects of their lives can be reconstructed. In this way, the accounting records studied are also shown to provide a latent source of social history that constitutes a profound mea culpa. © 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.