II
What do accounts offer historians that justifies their reading of austere registers and ledgers? To answer this question, it is convenient to draw a fairly clear, yet simplistic, distinction between the two ways farm accounts have been used in the historiography. The most common approach is to consider them as a source. Historians (and other researchers) usually read a farm’s accounts to learn about its situation in the local or global economy and to look at its productivity and financial performance.
1 Bethanie Afton, ‘Investigating agricultural production and land productivity: Methodology and opportunities using English farm records’, Histoire & Mesure, 15 (2000), pp. 233–45. The accounting archive that the historian treasures can also shed light on the ‘ways of doing things’, either the daily or seasonal pattern of work (and so employment), the sale of crops, investment or the long-term strategies employed by the farmer.
2 Michel de Certeau distinguishes two degrees of agency in these ways of doing things: ‘strategies are capable of producing, squaring and imposing types of operations, whereas tactics can only use, manipulate and divert them’. Michel de Certeau, ‘L’invention du quotidien: 1. Arts de faire’, Gallimard (1990), p. 51. Records are rarely solely confined to the management of income and expenditure. They give the valuation of assets and calculations of the profitability of the crop or livestock speculations.
3 In the modern era, farm registers vary widely in content. Very often, they mix everyday information with accounts and, sometimes, private memoranda. For a recent analysis of these heterogeneous writings, see Fulgence Delleaux (ed.), La plume et la terre: Écrire sur son exploitation agricole en Europe occidentale (1650–1850) (2021) and in particular the following chapters: Reiner Prass, ‘Les écrits personnels de paysans et l’histoire économique: Pour un tour d’horizon dans l’historiographie de l’Allemagne préindustrielle’, pp. 7–46; Jean-Marc Moriceau, ‘A travers les comptes des grands fermiers du bassin parisien (1689–1884): Modèle de gestion ou mémorial familial?’, pp. 99–124; Rosa Congost and Enric Sauger, ‘Mémoires humbles: Les écrits des travailleurs agricoles comme témoignages du changement social (région de Gerone, Catalogne, XVIIIe siècle)’, pp. 143–65. These literacy and numeracy practices were extended in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the keeping of diaries, specially designed to encourage farmers to write a daily account of their activities and their expenses and receipts. See here Nathalie Joly, ‘Écritures du travail et savoirs paysans: Aperçu historique et lecture de pratiques: Les agendas des agriculteurs’ (PhD Thesis, Université de Paris X: Nanterre, 1997); Philippe Madeline and Jean-Marc Moriceau, Un paysan et son univers de la guerre au marché commun: À travers les agendas de Pierre Lebugle, cultivateur en Pays d’Auge (2010). They can help to capture the decisions of landowners and farmers and their attitude towards innovations. They also provide otherwise scarce information on the social relationships forged in the setting of farming activity. Using farm accounts, historians handle ‘the little numbers’,
4 To take up Annie Antoine’s phrase in her reflection on the use of eighteenth-century accounts kept by small tenant farmers, Annie Antoine, ‘Entre macro et micro: Les comptabilités agricoles du XVIIIe siècle’, Histoire & Mesure 15 (2000), pp. 247–70. count, interpret, and deepen their knowledge of the farm operations by making careful cross-checks. It is also possible to take advantage of non-accounting information, such as that relating to the hiring of labour,
5 Joyce Burnette, ‘Seasonal patterns of agricultural day-labour at eight English farms, 1835–1844’, in John Hatcher and Judy Stephenson (eds), Seven centuries of unreal wages: The unreliable data, sources and methods that have been used for measuring standards of living in the past (2018), pp. 195–225. in order to analyse labour relations and the place of bargaining in the relationship between farmer and labourer.
6 Rachel Pintus, ‘La main d’œuvre d’une ferme du pays d’Ath: Le livre de comptes des Martin-Scaillez (fin XVIIIe–XIXe siècle)’, in Delleaux (ed.), La plume et la terre, pp. 167–81. This down-to-earth approach using simple accounts has proved its worth, with research demonstrating how micro-economic descriptions can bring nuance to,
7 Among others, M. E. Turner, J. V. Beckett, and Bethanie Afton, Agricultural rent in England, 1690–1914 (2004); Jean-Marc Moriceau and Gilles Postel-Vinay, Ferme, entreprise, famille: Grande exploitation et changements agricoles: Les Chartier, XVIIe–XIXe siècles (1992). and even correct, some of the certainties established by long statistical series.
8 Notably to counter the unreliability of statistical data at a national or provincial level and to revise established ideas about the backwardness of agriculture in a given place: Ramon Garrabou, Enric Saguer Hom, and Pere Sala López, ‘Formas de gestión y evolución de la renta a partir del análisis de contabilidades agrarias: Los patrimonios del Marqués de Sentmenat en el Vallés y Urgell (1820–1917)’, Noticiario de historia agraria: Boletín informativo del Seminario de Historia Agraria 5 (1993), pp. 97–125; María Teresa Pérez Picazo, ‘Riqueza territorial y cambio agrícola en la Murcia del siglo XIX: Aproximación al estudio de una contabilidad privada (circa 1800–1902)’, Agricultura y sociedad 61 (1991), pp. 39–96.A second way of studying accounts is to consider them as an object of investigation in themselves. The representativeness of the surviving accounts, though, may be extremely problematic.
9 ‘The historian is constantly aware that transmission cannot be complete. What he is less aware of, however, because it is a barely perceptible fact, is the inequality of these losses. The consequence of this is not only that the quantity of our knowledge is reduced, but also that the proportions of our knowledge are distorted. We like to assume that a little of everything has reached us, as if it were impossible for whole, coherent parts, whole continents, to have sunk.’ Arnold Esch, ‘Chance et hasard de transmission’, in Jean-Claude Schmitt and Otto Gerhard Oexle (eds), Le problème de la représentativité et de la déformation de la transmission historique: Les tendances actuelles de l’histoire du Moyen Âge en France et en Allemagne. Actes des colloques de Sèvres (1997), p. 15. Those who decide to address these questions – and they are few and far between – must have a taste for interdisciplinary dialogue. Since accounting is framed within social, organisational, and political contexts, they may find it necessary to invest in an array of concepts from different disciplines and new conceptual thinking. This is the case, for example, with the use of the core concept of ‘practice’, which tends to be deployed in a taken-for-granted manner while conceptual clarification is useful for analysing the relationship between social norms and the rule-structured practice of the individuals. The study of accounting reports may also call on highly specific methodologies such as codicology
10 Claire Bustarret, ‘Usages des supports d’écriture au XVIIIe siècle: Une esquisse codicologique’, Genesis. Manuscrits – Recherche – Invention, 34 (2012), pp. 37–65. or the ethnography of writing.
11 From the seminal work of Jack Goody to the approaches of the ‘New Literacy Studies’, there is a well-established tradition of research in Britain, North America, and France, see David Barton and Uta Papen (eds), The anthropology of writing: Understanding textually mediated worlds (2010). See also, in the same volume, on the ‘Writing farm’ and accountability, Nathalie Joly, ‘Tracing cows: Practical and administrative logics in tension’, pp. 90–105. In short, the history of accounting, either agricultural, commercial, or industrial, is basically a way of
establishing dialogues between different social sciences and, for those who take interdisciplinarity a step further, a chance to practise the art of comparison.
12 Instead of juxtaposing investigations between history and anthropology, the historian Marcel Detienne proposes to conduct them jointly to develop an experimental and constructive comparativism. Marcel Detienne, ‘L’art de construire des comparables: Entre historiens et anthropologues’, Critiques internationales 1 (2002), pp. 68–78.The ‘Foucauldian’ or ‘Critical’ School of accounting history (also called ‘New Accounting History’) illustrates this multi-disciplinary fruitfulness. Building upon Michel Foucault’s work on disciplines of the self and technologies of governmentality, a body of work from a number of researchers has re-examined the process through which accounting has assumed its modern forms.
13 Sverre Raffnsøe et al., ‘The Foucault effect in Organization Studies’, Organization Studies, 40 (2019), pp. 155–82. For a recent discussion of the contributions of this academic school, see Stephen P. Walker, ‘Revisiting the roles of accounting in society’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 49 (2016), pp. 41–50. Many aspects of the social functioning of accounting have been analysed through the lens of the influence of socio-political contexts on practices and techniques (and the other way round), and by studying the organisations that regulate and standardise accounting. Research on agricultural accounting is informed in various ways by these directions of analysis. As stressed by Massimo Sargiacomo
et al., the governmentality perspective can be applied to agriculture, ‘thus echoing the prior Foucauldian interest in Physiocratic perspective’.
14 Massimo Sargiacomo et al., ‘Accounting and the government of the agricultural economy: Arrigo Serpieri and the reclamation consortia’, Accounting History Review 26 (2016), pp. 307–31. We therefore propose to take stock of agricultural accounting research at the junction of farming objectives and organisations and policy issues.