Chapter illustrations ()
Loading image navigation...
No image index could be found for this publication.
Close this Panel
9
The Intentional Spread of Farm Accountancy Offices in Switzerland and the Netherlands, 1890–19401 The project that led to this publication has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement no 949722) and MSCA 833456: FARMACCOUNTA. This funding enables this chapter to appear Open Access under the licence CC BY-NC-ND.
Federico D’Onofrio
The spread of accounting and book-keeping has been famously linked to the advance of capitalism.2 This hypothesis, which ultimately has its roots in the work of Max Weber and Werner Sombart, has been critically reviewed and inverted by Eve Chiapello, ‘Accounting and the Birth of the Notion of Capitalism’, Critical Perspectives on Accounting 18 (2007), pp. 263–96. The historian of accounting R. A. Bryer dated the appearance of agrarian capitalism in England to the emergence of the rate of return on capital as a leading indicator of success in the seventeenth century.3 R. A. Bryer, ‘The History of Accounting and the Transition to Capitalism in England. Part One: Theory’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 25 (2000), pp. 131–62. Indeed, as has been shown by various chapters in this volume, estates and large farms developed accounting and book-keeping practices to rationalise their administration, enter new capital markets, try new forms of control of labour, and integrate agricultural and urban enterprises.4 See in this volume the chapters by Friederike Scholten-Buschhoff (ch. 3), James D. Fischer (ch. 2) and Laurent Herment (ch. 6). In fact, though, the family farm, rather than large capitalist estates, has been identified as the backbone of the ‘First Green Revolution’ that shaped the European countryside from the last decades of the nineteenth century onwards.5 J. L. van Zanden, ‘The First Green Revolution: The Growth of Production and Productivity in European Agriculture, 1870–1914’, Economic History Review 44 (1991), pp. 215–39. Here the take-up of accounts, especially double-entry accounts, has been shown to be slower.
For such farms, it is not clear whether the growing complexity of farm operations really necessitated the adoption of time consuming and cumbersome formal book-keeping (even as single-entry book-keeping). Controversially, Daan Hendrikx and Oscar Gelderblom, for instance, have claimed that ‘mental accounting’ would have probably satisfied the needs of Dutch farmers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.6 D. Hendrikx and O. Gelderblom, ‘Accounting for Agricultural Development? The Case of the Netherlands, 1840–1940’, Agricultural History Review 70 (2022), pp. 23–48. Other historians, instead, have insisted on the powerful effect of productivity on systematic accounting information.7 M. Lampe and P. Sharp, ‘A Quest for Useful Knowledge: The Early Development of Agricultural Accounting in Denmark and Northern Germany’, Accounting History Review 27 (2017), pp. 73–99.
What explains, though, the diffusion of accounting and book-keeping to family farms that took place over the course of the twentieth century in Europe?8 This includes socialist Europe, as the work of Martha Lampland on Hungary shows: M. Lampland, ‘False Numbers as Formalizing Practices’, Social Studies of Science 40 (2010), pp. 377–404; idem, The Value of Labor: The Science of Commodification in Hungary, 1920–1956 (2016). By examining the case of the Netherlands and Switzerland, this chapter shows that the spread of farm accounting was the result of an intentional, concerted effort by agricultural experts, economists, extension officers, farmers’ leaders and, more generally, the rural elites. It therefore only partially responded to the managerial needs of farmers, and served instead other goals.
The elite’s zeal in favour of book-keeping has been widely discussed in the literature as part of a campaign to educate farmers to become more rational and effective: the accounting farmer appeared as an ideal of sound agronomic practices.9 T. Depecker and N. Joly, ‘Agronomists and Accounting: The Beginnings of Capitalist Rationalisation on the Farm (1800–1850)’, Historia Agraria (2015), pp. 75–94; N. Joly, ‘Educating in Economic Calculus: The Invention of the Enlightened Peasant via Manuals of Agriculture, 1830–1870’, Accounting History Review 26 (2016), pp. 131–60; P. Labardin and P. Gervais, ‘Marketing the Past over the Long Run: Uses of the Past in French Accounting Textbooks, 17th–19th C.’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 14 (2022), pp. 90–110. This chapter adopts a different approach. Jiri Auderset and Peter Moser have recently underlined the crucial role of accounting as the lingua franca of agricultural economics and policy.10 J. Auderset and P. Moser, Die Agrarfrage in der Industriegesellschaft: Wissenskulturen, Machtverhältnisse und natürliche Ressourcen in der agrarisch-industriellen Wissensgesellschaft (1850–1950) (2018), p. 94. Building on their contribution, this chapter shows that, for the rural elites of the early twentieth century, book-keeping was not only indispensable for improved management of the farm, but also, increasingly, as a tool of the government of agriculture as a whole and thus played – to use the terminology of New Accounting History – a broad ‘societal function’.11 S. Burchell et al., ‘The Roles of Accounting in Organizations and Society’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 5 (1980), pp. 5–27; N. M. Gandhi, ‘The Emergence of the Post-Industrial Society and the Future of the Accounting Function’, Journal of Management Studies 13 (1976), pp. 199–212.
In particular, this chapter analyses the role of meso-level institutions, such as farmers’ unions of varying kinds and orientation, in promoting accounting. The literature has recognized the importance of the dense network of associations and co-operatives that covered the European countryside in the modernization of the continent’s agriculture.12 J. L. van Zanden, De economische ontwikkeling van de Nederlandse landbouw in de negentiende eeuw, 1800–1914 (1985), p. 246. Literature on Switzerland and the Netherlands has particularly stressed this role of farmers’ organizations, focusing on the integration of agriculture in industrial society (in the case of Switzerland) or the complex scientific and institutional matrix underpinning agricultural development (in the case of the Netherlands).13 P. Moser, J. Auderset and B. Baechi, ‘Die agrarisch-industrielle Wissensgesellschaft im 19. / 20. Jahrhundert: Akteure, Diskurse, Praktiken’, in B. Brodbeck, M. Ineichen and T. Schibli (eds), Geschichte im virtuellen Archiv: Das Archiv für Agrargeschichte als Zentrum der Archivierung und Geschichtsschreibung zur ländlichen Gesellschaft (2012), pp. 21–38; Auderset and Moser, Die Agrarfrage in der Industriegesellschaft; A. Schuurman, ‘Agricultural Policy and the Dutch Agricultural Institutional Matrix during the Transition from Organized to Disorganized Capitalism: Integration through Subordination: The Politics of Agricultural Modernisation in Industrial Europe’, in P. Moser and P. Varley (eds), Integration through Subordination: The Politics of Agricultural Modernisation in Industrial Europe (2013), pp. 65–84; M. Molema, ‘Collective Organisation of Knowledge in the Early Phase of the Dutch-Friesian Dairy Industry (c. 1880–1914)’, Historia Agraria 73 (2017), pp. 91–118; H. Zwarts, ‘Knowledge, Networks, and Niches: Dutch Agricultural Innovation in an International Perspective, c. 1880–1970’ (PhD Dissertation, Wageningen University, 2021). The chapter argues that, through the establishment of accounting offices, they were essential not only in providing cheap accounting services but also in turning book-keeping into an element of the collective action of farmers.
Family and farm budgets (also called surveys) had been collected by interviewers (often agricultural economists), who interviewed peasant families, since the beginning of the nineteenth century. These had been used as a tool for interpreting and governing the countryside, developing from the pioneering work of social reformers, such as Frédéric Le Play, into the big enquiries of the early twentieth century.14 Among the extensive literature on Le Play, see T. Porter, ‘The Engineer and the Sage: Le Play’s Quest for Social Renewal and the Reconstruction of Observation’, History of Observation in Economics Working Paper Series 2 (2009). On budget surveys in enquiries, F. D’Onofrio, ‘Making Variety Simple: Agricultural Economists in Southern Italy, 1906–9’, History of Political Economy 44 (2012), pp. 93–113; F. D’Onofrio, Observing Agriculture in Early Twentieth-Century Italy: Agricultural Economists and Statistics (2016), chs 3 and 6. But accounting offices involved farmers in the production of data that entered the policy-making process. Most of all, farm accounting offices became part of a constellation of activities and services that farmers’ associations, co-ops, co-operative banks and local government offices offered to farmers. The spread of farm accounting was therefore inscribed in the broader role played by farmers’ organizations and their leadership as ‘defenders of agriculture’ vis-à-vis the industrial interest, urban workers and governments.
The first section of this chapter describes how accounting and book-keeping emerged as a policy question in various continental European countries in the wake of the agrarian crisis of the 1870s and 1880s. The second and third sections analyse two different institutional models for the organization of accounting services: the Dutch – in particular the organization created in the provinces of Friesland and Groningen – and the Swiss. The fourth section finally shows how farm accountancy data emerged as a form of representation of farmers’ interests within European countries and in the rising international arena.
 
1      The project that led to this publication has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement no 949722) and MSCA 833456: FARMACCOUNTA. This funding enables this chapter to appear Open Access under the licence CC BY-NC-ND. »
2      This hypothesis, which ultimately has its roots in the work of Max Weber and Werner Sombart, has been critically reviewed and inverted by Eve Chiapello, ‘Accounting and the Birth of the Notion of Capitalism’, Critical Perspectives on Accounting 18 (2007), pp. 263–96. »
3      R. A. Bryer, ‘The History of Accounting and the Transition to Capitalism in England. Part One: Theory’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 25 (2000), pp. 131–62. »
4      See in this volume the chapters by Friederike Scholten-Buschhoff (ch. 3), James D. Fischer (ch. 2) and Laurent Herment (ch. 6). »
5      J. L. van Zanden, ‘The First Green Revolution: The Growth of Production and Productivity in European Agriculture, 1870–1914’, Economic History Review 44 (1991), pp. 215–39. »
6      D. Hendrikx and O. Gelderblom, ‘Accounting for Agricultural Development? The Case of the Netherlands, 1840–1940’, Agricultural History Review 70 (2022), pp. 23–48.  »
7      M. Lampe and P. Sharp, ‘A Quest for Useful Knowledge: The Early Development of Agricultural Accounting in Denmark and Northern Germany’, Accounting History Review 27 (2017), pp. 73–99. »
8      This includes socialist Europe, as the work of Martha Lampland on Hungary shows: M. Lampland, ‘False Numbers as Formalizing Practices’, Social Studies of Science 40 (2010), pp. 377–404; idem, The Value of Labor: The Science of Commodification in Hungary, 1920–1956 (2016). »
9      T. Depecker and N. Joly, ‘Agronomists and Accounting: The Beginnings of Capitalist Rationalisation on the Farm (1800–1850)’, Historia Agraria (2015), pp. 75–94; N. Joly, ‘Educating in Economic Calculus: The Invention of the Enlightened Peasant via Manuals of Agriculture, 1830–1870’, Accounting History Review 26 (2016), pp. 131–60; P. Labardin and P. Gervais, ‘Marketing the Past over the Long Run: Uses of the Past in French Accounting Textbooks, 17th–19th C.’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 14 (2022), pp. 90–110. »
10      J. Auderset and P. Moser, Die Agrarfrage in der Industriegesellschaft: Wissenskulturen, Machtverhältnisse und natürliche Ressourcen in der agrarisch-industriellen Wissensgesellschaft (1850–1950) (2018), p. 94. »
11      S. Burchell et al., ‘The Roles of Accounting in Organizations and Society’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 5 (1980), pp. 5–27; N. M. Gandhi, ‘The Emergence of the Post-Industrial Society and the Future of the Accounting Function’, Journal of Management Studies 13 (1976), pp. 199–212. »
12      J. L. van Zanden, De economische ontwikkeling van de Nederlandse landbouw in de negentiende eeuw, 1800–1914 (1985), p. 246. »
13      P. Moser, J. Auderset and B. Baechi, ‘Die agrarisch-industrielle Wissensgesellschaft im 19. / 20. Jahrhundert: Akteure, Diskurse, Praktiken’, in B. Brodbeck, M. Ineichen and T. Schibli (eds), Geschichte im virtuellen Archiv: Das Archiv für Agrargeschichte als Zentrum der Archivierung und Geschichtsschreibung zur ländlichen Gesellschaft (2012), pp. 21–38; Auderset and Moser, Die Agrarfrage in der Industriegesellschaft; A. Schuurman, ‘Agricultural Policy and the Dutch Agricultural Institutional Matrix during the Transition from Organized to Disorganized Capitalism: Integration through Subordination: The Politics of Agricultural Modernisation in Industrial Europe’, in P. Moser and P. Varley (eds), Integration through Subordination: The Politics of Agricultural Modernisation in Industrial Europe (2013), pp. 65–84; M. Molema, ‘Collective Organisation of Knowledge in the Early Phase of the Dutch-Friesian Dairy Industry (c. 1880–1914)’, Historia Agraria 73 (2017), pp. 91–118; H. Zwarts, ‘Knowledge, Networks, and Niches: Dutch Agricultural Innovation in an International Perspective, c. 1880–1970’ (PhD Dissertation, Wageningen University, 2021). »
14      Among the extensive literature on Le Play, see T. Porter, ‘The Engineer and the Sage: Le Play’s Quest for Social Renewal and the Reconstruction of Observation’, History of Observation in Economics Working Paper Series 2 (2009). On budget surveys in enquiries, F. D’Onofrio, ‘Making Variety Simple: Agricultural Economists in Southern Italy, 1906–9’, History of Political Economy 44 (2012), pp. 93–113; F. D’Onofrio, Observing Agriculture in Early Twentieth-Century Italy: Agricultural Economists and Statistics (2016), chs 3 and 6. »