I
The term ‘accounting’ did not have a stable meaning in the period considered in this volume. The chapters therefore reflect changes in meaning and usage over time, with nuances depending on the country. Accounting historians have highlighted the gradual shift from the term ‘book-keeping’ to ‘accounting’. Parker pointed out that the first term appeared in English-language book titles at the end of the seventeenth century, and became a widespread expression in the eighteenth, evoking the probable Dutch origin (‘
boekhouden’) of the term. The German expressions ‘
buchhalten’ and ‘
Buchhaltung’ appeared much earlier, in the sixteenth century.
1 R. H. Parker, ‘Finding English words to talk about accounting concepts’, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal 7 (1994), pp. 70–85; idem, ‘Reckoning, merchants’ accounts, book‐keeping, accounting or accountancy? The evidence of the long titles of books on accounting in English, 1543–1914’, in B. Carsber and S. Dev (eds), External financial reporting (1984), pp. 109–22. In France, the term ‘
tenue des livres’ became part of the vocabulary of treatises published in the nineteenth century. Without going into the details of semantic evolutions, we may adopt Labardin and Nikitin’s view that in both England and France the term ‘book-keeping’ has been gradually relegated to a subordinate status (the ‘practical’ part of accounting) which can be undertaken with little or no training. It is the act of recording individual transactions. Its demotion is closely linked to the appearance of formal accountancy training and the demand by accountants for recognition of their professional status in the second half of the nineteenth century. Accounting came to be defined as a ‘science’ responsible for the rational creation and coordination of accounts relating to an activity and the analysis of changes in capital.
2 Pierre Labardin and Marc Nikitin, ‘Accounting and the words to tell it: An historical perspective’, Accounting, Business and Financial History 19 (2009), pp. 149–66. In fact, the actual meaning and significance of accounting and book-keeping appear to have been actively negotiated in the historical cases discussed in this book.