Accounting History and young scholars

The study of Accounting History conveys to young researchers the stages of a journey with millennia-old cultural origins, during which lived experiences, expected and achieved results, hopes, failures, victories, symbols, values, tools and the processes for their use have been composed into a unified vision and almost added together, thus forming a kind of inheritance that is an indispensable source of information for those who wish to know the laborious path of humankind.

It is indeed through Accounting History that it is possible to appreciate, almost tangibly, how the dynamics experienced by organisations – public and private, producing and consuming, simple and complex – can be deeply understood and interpreted by drawing on the historical source of accounting data. Produced in a continuum, these data faithfully and uninterruptedly bear witness to the development of the organisation, to the changes in the way it relates to the environment in which it is placed and operates, and to the changes in the scenario of which it is a privileged and characterising actor.

From the accounting records of the countless administrative events carried out by the organisation in its vital relationship with the social, economic, political and cultural context, the new student of accounting can trace back the characteristics of the particular environment in which those management events took place.

Indeed, accounting data, carefully reread and interpreted, tell the daily events of economic agents, the conjunctures they experienced, together with the times of prosperity they went through and the critical periods they overcame; moreover, they identify the logical thread and weave the plot of events that to the inattentive eye appear unconnected and distant, composing them into a unified fabric that reveals the behaviour of business operators, shows the objectives they pursued and the decisions taken to achieve them. Leafing through the account books that have come down to us from past centuries and interpreting the records of administrative events kept over time to follow events in the accounts, the researcher can therefore “read” the unfolding life of organisations and trace the profile of the evolutionary path they followed over the decades.

The young scholar can thus approach the examination of accounting documents that bear witness to civilisations now gone, such as the Hittite, Sumerian, Assyro-Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman, through inscriptions on clay tablets, on parchments or incunabula written in monastery cells, in company warehouses, in the austere halls of banks, as well as in the rooms of money changers, in castle towers or at the courts of sovereigns, as if before a language made of signs and symbols from which there emerges, on the one hand, the culture of the agent operating at a given time and in a given scenario and, on the other, the narrative of the socio-economic expectations of a given historical context and, ultimately, the underlying values that animated it.

To “young accountants”, accounting data convey ethical, business and environmental cultures and values; the technologies adopted, the processes followed, the organisational structures assumed, the motivational premises, the power recognised at a given historical moment: all expressed symbolically and synthetically, albeit mediated, through the quantitative-monetary dimension.

By promoting knowledge of the cultural conditions behind what appears to be a mere “number”, the study of Accounting History points the researcher's gaze towards what is still waiting to be revealed – the presence of values and needs that have characterised the activity of economic individuals at all times – opening an inquiry into the universal and immutable codes of behaviour underlying human action.

Thus accounting records – having to faithfully record and summarise, for the use of the organisations that keep them, the individual aspects of each transaction through which business culture confronts environmental or anthropological culture, and having moreover to convey the results of certain “lines of conduct” variously shaped in response to the cultural characteristics of the operating scenario – have undergone an evolutionary process that has seen a succession of methodologies, approaches and theories, each a specific and characteristic product of the times in which they developed.

Precisely the need to inevitably adapt accounting methods to changing scenarios shows young accounting scholars the way to interpret the thought and propositions of the authoritative Masters of the “science of accounts”: every theory, every cognitive objective, every recording system developed by the Masters of the discipline is grounded in the unrepeatable conditions of the environment to whose interpretation those scholars offered meaningful answers and effective directions for development.

In this way Accounting History entrusts its students with the line of study indicated by the Masters of accounting: the future reading of the inextricable evolution of humankind's destinies and of the parallel tools it creates so that environmental trends can be transformed into the “science of accounting reasons”, and the latter can become the platform for future socio-economic dynamics.

Accounting History entrusts young scholars with the role of critical readers of the past, so that they may be effective vehicles for passing on acquired knowledge to the future and become builders of a better world.