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Introduction1 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 833546: FARMACCOUNTA. This funding has enabled the Introduction and Chapter 9 of this volume to be published Open Access under the licence CC BY-NC-ND.
Nathalie Joly and Federico D’Onofrio
In the wake of the cultural approach to the Industrial Revolution,2 Deirdre McCloskey, The bourgeois virtues: Ethics for an age of commerce (2006); Joel Mokyr, ‘The intellectual origins of modern economic growth’, Journal of Economic History 65 (2005) pp. 285–351; David S. Landes, ‘Culture makes almost all the difference’, in Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (eds), Culture matters: How values shape human progress (2000), pp. 1–13. historians have investigated the intellectual and social origins of the sustained growth of European agriculture in early modern and modern Europe. In particular, they have stressed the significance of ‘useful knowledge’ in underpinning technological progress. Did an ‘Agricultural Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century metamorphose into an ‘Agricultural Revolution’?3 Peter M. Jones, Agricultural enlightenment: Knowledge, technology, and nature, 1750–1840 (2016), pp. 31–2. What were the effects of the ‘agromania’ that swept through Europe after the Peace of Aachen and reached even Europe’s remote peripheries?4 Istvan Hont, ‘Correcting Europe’s political economy: The virtuous eclecticism of Georg Ludwig Schmid’, History of European Ideas 33 (2007), pp. 390–410; Koen Stapelbroek and Jani Marjanen, ‘Political economy, patriotism and the rise of societies’, in Stapelbroek and Marjanen (eds), The rise of economic societies in the eighteenth century: Patriotic reform in Europe and North America (2012), pp. 1–25. Dissemination and emulation issues, along with discussions of competing institutional frameworks facilitating innovation and technological adoption, have become central themes in the historiography.5 Jones, Agricultural enlightenment, ch. 4; Frank Uekötter, Die Wahrheit ist auf dem Feld: Eine Wissensgeschichte der deutschen Landwirtschaft, Umwelt und Gesellschaft (2010); Jonathan Harwood, Europe’s Green Revolution and others since (2016). Historians have investigated the impact of scientific knowledge on farming practices. Modernising elites and experts engaged in spreading innovation – both by setting an example to be emulated and actively advocating new techniques through propaganda, education, and even coercion. Calculative practices were an integral part of the effort of the innovators, especially when, in the second half of the eighteenth century, as Keith Tribe has argued, ‘a new discursive formation came into being, one whose structure is constituted by a specific conjunction of concepts of capital, profit, exchange, production and distribution’.6 Keith Tribe, Land, labour, and economic discourse (1978), p. 5. Once the farm came to be seen as a unit of production comparable with other economic units, arguments concerning rational management became central. Accounting could thus serve as a means to gather essential farm-related information. From the eighteenth century and well into the twentieth, European elites adopted an ideal model of an accounting farmer meticulously recording economic transactions, seeing tidy book-keeping7 We have used the form ‘book-keeping’ in preference to other possible variants throughout the book. as being the basis of sound management and the adoption of new techniques.
By investigating the invention of the accounting farmer as an emblem of modern agriculture, this book draws together two poorly connected areas of historical research in the social sciences: on the one hand, a body of scattered investigations devoted to agricultural accounting in different countries and, on the other, the more substantial body of work on the process of agricultural modernisation in Europe between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. What exactly is there to connect? First, we have the materials, observations, and analyses which are already available and which span the three centuries we consider. Since knowledge is held in silos, period by period, country by country, researchers are often unaware of each other and hardly ever discuss and compare their findings. We believe that the juxtaposition of different periods, historiographies, and objects of agricultural accounting studies can produce unexpected results and prompt the study of hitherto neglected subjects. Second, it is necessary to make better connections between our knowledge of accounting, whose development is seemingly associated with modernity and capitalist rationality, and the analysis of the economic and cultural mechanisms of the transformation of European agriculture which progressed in fits and starts from the late seventeenth century onwards.8 A good definition of agricultural modernisation in terms of technological, social, managerial, and ecological change can be found in Margot Lyautey, Léna Humbert, and Christophe Bonneuil, ‘Introduction’, in Lyautey, Humbert, and Bonneuil (eds), Histoire des modernisations agricoles au XXe siècle (2021), pp. 5–6.
Following Latour, we may contend that accounting reports became key ‘representations’ to produce economic and managerial knowledge.9 In his seminal reflection on the role of inscriptions as ways of representing things and to know them, both for scientific thought and everyday life thought as well, Bruno Latour, ‘Visualization and cognition’, Knowledge and Society 6 (1986), pp. 1–40. To paraphrase the French sociologist, no new man suddenly emerged who thought differently from the inhabitants of the pre-industrial agricultural world.10 This sentence paraphrases Latour speaking of modern scientific culture: ‘No “new man” suddenly emerged sometime in the sixteenth century, and there are no mutants with larger brains working inside modern laboratories who can think differently from the rest of us. The idea that a more rational mind or a more constraining scientific method emerged from darkness and chaos is too complicated a hypothesis.’ Latour, ‘Visualization and cognition’, p. 1. This volume puts forward a more mundane explanation of change in economic practice, by considering accounting as a means of ‘Drawing Things Together’ in a particular calculative manner. It thus strives to trace how the actors who were concerned, whether directly or ‘at a distance’11 For a theoretical focus on quantification and action at a distance, see Keith Robson, ‘Accounting numbers as “inscription”: Action at a distance and the development of accounting’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 17 (1992), pp. 685–708. – be they estate owners, their bailiffs and stewards, scholars in the field of agronomy and political economy, financial investors, professional organisations, or state agencies – developed representations of rational, profit-orientated agriculture. As varied as the works gathered here are in their analytic framework, they share the idea that accounting could be performative for decision-making and management.12 Inspired by the seminal works of Michel Callon. Michael Callon (ed.), The laws of the markets (1998); Donald MacKenzie, An engine, not a camera: How financial models shape markets (2006). The literature on the performativity of accounting is now too large to be discussed here. The aim is, then, to determine in what ways and to what extent accounts and accounting might have influenced the development of agriculture, as it has industry and commerce.
This volume originated in a panel organised at the fifth biennial conference of the European Rural History Organisation (EURHO), Rural History 2021 in Uppsala.13 Entitled ‘Farmers that count: Standardisation and stewardship in farm accounting, eighteenth to twentieth century’. The papers presented in these sessions stimulated a discussion concerning the spread of agricultural accounting during three centuries of European history. At the heart of our exchanges was a questioning of the reasons that led rural elites and scholars to invest in the adoption of agricultural accounting.14 The composition of rural elites, and their role in the spread of accounting, vary according to the political and economic contexts of the countries studied here. For a more general view of the role of elites in agricultural progress, see Nadine Vivier (ed.), Élites et progrès agricole: XVIe–XXe siècle (2009). We also looked at the growing role played by the state through incentives and educational policies, in tandem with the professional organisations that sprang up across Europe in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We hope that this volume marks an important step in the understanding of how accounting became constitutive of new calculative reasonings and managerial practices in agriculture. Chiapello and Gilbert have reminded us that management techniques ‘prescribe action formats, building a unity of action within a work collective’.15 Ève Chiapello and Patrick Gilbert, Sociologie des outils de gestion (2020), pp. 29–30. But this role expands far beyond organisations. Management techniques are also influential in the making, on a day-to-day basis, of the economic system and market mechanisms. By studying accounting in both its institutional genesis and its embodiment in the social figure of the accounting farmer, we can make a new contribution to the analysis of the integration of agriculture into the industrialising societies of Europe. This book sets out to do just that.
In this introduction, we begin by reviewing the historiography of agricultural accounting. We stress the importance of considering accounting as a social practice. Here we make reference to the research of the school of ‘new accounting history’.16 Peter Miller, Trevor Hopper, and Richard Laughlin, ‘The new accounting history: An introduction’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 16 (1991), pp. 395–403. Then we present the main achievements of earlier work on agricultural accounting. We look at accounting successively through textbooks and practices, a perspective which reflects, we think, the two dominant analytical orientations taken by researchers. Our review makes no pretension to being exhaustive. The literature on farm accounting, while still relatively limited, spans too many disciplines and countries for us to be able to encompass it all. We aim instead to elicit the major approaches to farm accounting and the debates which the chapters collected here respond to and complement. Following this overview, we will outline the chapters of the book. To conclude, after we have asked ourselves ‘who has written and who is writing’17 Questions precisely raised in Yannick Lemarchand and Robert Parker (eds), Accounting in France: Historical essays/Etudes historiques (1996). the history of agricultural accounting, we pave the way for future developments.
 
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 833546: FARMACCOUNTA. This funding has enabled the Introduction and Chapter 9 of this volume to be published Open Access under the licence CC BY-NC-ND. »
2      Deirdre McCloskey, The bourgeois virtues: Ethics for an age of commerce (2006); Joel Mokyr, ‘The intellectual origins of modern economic growth’, Journal of Economic History 65 (2005) pp. 285–351; David S. Landes, ‘Culture makes almost all the difference’, in Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (eds), Culture matters: How values shape human progress (2000), pp. 1–13. »
3      Peter M. Jones, Agricultural enlightenment: Knowledge, technology, and nature, 1750–1840 (2016), pp. 31–2.  »
4      Istvan Hont, ‘Correcting Europe’s political economy: The virtuous eclecticism of Georg Ludwig Schmid’, History of European Ideas 33 (2007), pp. 390–410; Koen Stapelbroek and Jani Marjanen, ‘Political economy, patriotism and the rise of societies’, in Stapelbroek and Marjanen (eds), The rise of economic societies in the eighteenth century: Patriotic reform in Europe and North America (2012), pp. 1–25. »
5      Jones, Agricultural enlightenment, ch. 4; Frank Uekötter, Die Wahrheit ist auf dem Feld: Eine Wissensgeschichte der deutschen Landwirtschaft, Umwelt und Gesellschaft (2010); Jonathan Harwood, Europe’s Green Revolution and others since (2016).  »
6      Keith Tribe, Land, labour, and economic discourse (1978), p. 5.  »
7      We have used the form ‘book-keeping’ in preference to other possible variants throughout the book. »
8      A good definition of agricultural modernisation in terms of technological, social, managerial, and ecological change can be found in Margot Lyautey, Léna Humbert, and Christophe Bonneuil, ‘Introduction’, in Lyautey, Humbert, and Bonneuil (eds), Histoire des modernisations agricoles au XXe siècle (2021), pp. 5–6. »
9      In his seminal reflection on the role of inscriptions as ways of representing things and to know them, both for scientific thought and everyday life thought as well, Bruno Latour, ‘Visualization and cognition’, Knowledge and Society 6 (1986), pp. 1–40.  »
10      This sentence paraphrases Latour speaking of modern scientific culture: ‘No “new man” suddenly emerged sometime in the sixteenth century, and there are no mutants with larger brains working inside modern laboratories who can think differently from the rest of us. The idea that a more rational mind or a more constraining scientific method emerged from darkness and chaos is too complicated a hypothesis.’ Latour, ‘Visualization and cognition’, p. 1.  »
11      For a theoretical focus on quantification and action at a distance, see Keith Robson, ‘Accounting numbers as “inscription”: Action at a distance and the development of accounting’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 17 (1992), pp. 685–708. »
12      Inspired by the seminal works of Michel Callon. Michael Callon (ed.), The laws of the markets (1998); Donald MacKenzie, An engine, not a camera: How financial models shape markets (2006). The literature on the performativity of accounting is now too large to be discussed here. »
13      Entitled ‘Farmers that count: Standardisation and stewardship in farm accounting, eighteenth to twentieth century’. »
14      The composition of rural elites, and their role in the spread of accounting, vary according to the political and economic contexts of the countries studied here. For a more general view of the role of elites in agricultural progress, see Nadine Vivier (ed.), Élites et progrès agricole: XVIe–XXe siècle (2009). »
15      Ève Chiapello and Patrick Gilbert, Sociologie des outils de gestion (2020), pp. 29–30. »
16      Peter Miller, Trevor Hopper, and Richard Laughlin, ‘The new accounting history: An introduction’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 16 (1991), pp. 395–403. »
17      Questions precisely raised in Yannick Lemarchand and Robert Parker (eds), Accounting in France: Historical essays/Etudes historiques (1996). »