III
Accounting literature in the sense of practice manuals and textbooks is a key source for a range of researchers including historians, sociologists, and scholars of management. They can examine the writers’ viewpoints and prescriptions for accounting systems as they co-evolve with farming practices and rural societies. They can also see how approaches to costing and valuation or the techniques of record-keeping have varied over time as much as the management of the workforce. Treatises, manuals, and textbooks of the early modern and modern era may be considered both as instruments and symptoms of the role that accounting was gradually acquiring in the functioning of the farm and in its relations with a set of external entities, amongst them state agencies and academia. Historians have noted the development of accounting literature in the first half of the nineteenth century without being able to assess it precisely.
1 We have a much better view of the literature dealing with agriculture in general, as rural historians have systematised the study of these sources as a means of learning about innovations. The quantification of this literature is made more difficult by the fact that the titles of accounting handbooks do not systematically mention when they contain instructions and recording models specifically intended for agriculture. Economic and agronomic treatises can contain extensive explanations of accounting methods, followed by examples of completed accounts as part of comprehensive surveys of farming practice. In addition, the writings directed at a popular readership have barely been studied, but Joly has demonstrated the potential of studying popular manuals and agrarian catechisms, which offered technical knowledge, instructions as to how to keep accounts, and moral exhortations to practise regular book-keeping.
2 Nathalie 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. Although much more remains to be done, the historiography has established a number of reliable benchmarks concerning the importance of accountancy literature in different European countries.
3 For France, see the bibliographic reference database ‘French bookkeeping and accounting treatises and manuals from 1657 to 1950’ at http://www.msh.univ-nantes.fr/documentation/comptabilite/comptabiliteprivee/; for Italy, see the typology of accountancy literature from 1771 to 1922 proposed by Marie-Lucie Rossi, ‘Une comptabilité industrielle: L’entreprise agricole du Pô à l’Arno (1826–1922)’, in Twelfth accounting and management history conference (2007), pp. 29–30. For Britain, see Parker’s inventory of English language treatises on double-entry accounting before 1850, mainly generalist and from the pens of teachers, Robert H. Parker, ‘Roger North: Gentleman, accountant and lexicographer’, Accounting History 2 (1997), pp. 31–51.It is not surprising that a considerable diversity of accounting systems was recommended over time. Even if we restrict our analysis to the books that discuss the accounts of estate owners, the purpose and the content of the records which landlords were advised to keep differed according to whether the owners leased out their land or farmed it in hand, a point which has been well illustrated in Edwards’ detailed study of English accounting treatises from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
4 J. R. Edwards, ‘Accounting on English landed estates during the Agricultural Revolution: A textbook perspective’, Accounting Historians Journal 38 (2011), pp. 1–45. In the early modern era, some writers, taking mercantile practice as their reference,
5 This is the case of the English treatises on double-entry book-keeping, which treat landed estates separately. were convinced that estate accounting should be based squarely on the principles of Double-Entry Book-keeping (DEB) while others defended Charge and Discharge Accounting (CDA) saying it not only served as a check on stewards, but also generated cash flow information and the assessment of the current financial position of an estate.
The technique of Charge and Discharge Accounting, used since the Middle Ages for manorial administration, gradually fell into disfavour during the period of the so-called ‘Agricultural Enlightenment’.
6 One must be cautious not to generalise since there are many nuances from one region to another. We will see in the next section that if CDA ceased to be recommended in the literature, it remained popular in practice. Its persistence in both estate and farm accounting has long puzzled historians. Putting aside the tricky interpretation of the durability of a method considered by many experts to be less suited to the calculation of financial performance, we can note the disagreements among accounting historians over the interpretation to be placed on the decline of the CDA in the accounting literature. There are two opposing views on this point: some consider the evolution of accounting techniques in terms of continuous progress – a teleological thought – and proceeding by ‘natural selection’, while others emphasise the social component of techniques, incorporating collective and individual issues.
7 On this controversial point, see Edwards, ‘Accounting on English landed estates’ and Yves Levant and Henri Zimnovitch, ‘Overview of cost accounting practices in France from the early nineteenth century to the 1880s’, Accounting History 27 (2022), pp. 576–606. For the former, CDA was no longer promoted as soon as DEB was available while, according to the latter, CDA continued to be employed because of a series of intertwined factors, amongst them a lack of economic competition and therefore of incentive to adopt a more complex technology, path dependency, and a possible prejudice against a mercantile method.
8 For instance, Lemarchand revealed a prejudice against techniques of mercantile accounting within governmental circles in late eighteenth-century France. This might be also the case in agriculture. Yannick Lemarchand, ‘Double entry versus charge and discharge accounting in eighteenth-century France’, Accounting, Business and Financial History 4 (1994), pp. 119–45.Following the studies of Christian Licoppe,
9 For a landmark work on the history of science experiments, see Christian Licoppe, La formation de la pratique scientifique: Le discours de l’expérience en France et en Angleterre (1630–1820) (2013). Depecker and Joly investigated the evolution of regimes of knowledge in agricultural sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They stressed how the rise of quantification in agronomic science at the dawn of the nineteenth century has affected representations of farming processes.
10 Thomas Depecker and Nathalie Joly, ‘Agronomists and accounting: The beginnings of capitalist rationalisation on the farm (1800–1850)’, Historia Agraria (2015), pp. 75–94. The two sociologists related the development of agronomic accounting to the global evolution of science and dissemination of scientific thought and to the experimentation initiated in the first half of the sixteenth century which gained ground in agriculture during the nineteenth century. Researchers have also looked more directly at the role of accounting in managerial thought and action.
11 Nathalie Joly, René Bourrigaud, and Fabien Knittel, ‘Administrer une ferme-modèle au xixe siècle: Deux expériences d’agronomes entrepreneurs ruraux, Mathieu de Dombasle et Rieffel’, Entreprises et histoire 3 (2017), pp. 21–36. Indeed, in the late eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth centuries, most agricultural writers were scientists attempting to convince large landowners of the superiority of the new agronomic techniques. They were also developing management techniques, since many of these authors managed at the same time model farms, and, for some of them, such as Thaer in Northern Germany and Mathieu de Dombasle in France, were the directors of agronomic training institutions. The search for optimal profitability required the setting up of experiments – on tillage, crop rotation, livestock feeding and so on – and simultaneously, the designing of sophisticated accounting systems.
12 Thomas Depecker and François Vatin, ‘Taking stock to yield a return: Agricultural accounting, agronomometry and chemical statics in the early-nineteenth century’, Accounting History Review 26 (2016), pp. 107–29; Markus Lampe and Paul 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; Thomas Depecker and Nathalie Joly, ‘La terre et ses manufacturiers: L’introduction d’une raison gestionnaire dans les domaines agricoles (1800–1850)’, Entreprises et histoire 79 (2015), pp. 12–23.A well-known hypothesis, traditionally associated with prominent sociologists such as Werner Sombart and Max Weber and with the economist Marx, connects the use of DEB with the birth of ‘capitalist spirit’.
13 For more on Sombart, Weber and Marx’s views on the birth of capitalism and the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, see Eve Chiapello, ‘Accounting and the birth of the notion of capitalism’, Critical perspectives on accounting 18 (2007), pp. 263–96. Historians of farm accounting have also linked the advocacy of new accounting practices by the likes of Arthur Young with the rise of capitalist farming.
14 For Marx, the ‘capitalist mentality’ pursues the rate of return on capital employed in production by extracting surplus value from the sale of commodities or services produced by wage labour. Taking this definition as a key to analysing the English revolution, Bryer has argued that Marx’s prediction came true, as evidenced by English farmers’ accounts from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Rob A. Bryer, ‘The genesis of the capitalist farmer: Towards a Marxist accounting history of the origins of the English agricultural revolution’, Critical Perspectives on Accounting 17 (2006), pp. 367–97. In fact, if DEB does not seem so obviously and intrinsically connected to a business-like attitude, it nevertheless enables the rationalisation of both the technical means of production and the social relations in farming, as Depecker and Joly have stressed. Hence Carruthers and Espeland consider the advocacy for DEB essentially as powerful rhetoric: it gave legitimacy to capitalist farming and by doing so, might have profoundly altered the way actors interpreted and understood their economic operations and results.
15 Rhetoric is defined as ‘techniques that are used to make a convincing or persuasive argument’. Bruce G. Carruthers and Wendy Nelson Espeland, ‘Accounting for rationality: Double-entry bookkeeping and the rhetoric of economic rationality’, American Journal of Sociology 97 (1991), pp. 31–69.At any rate, it seems that agricultural accounting historians have given disproportionate importance to double-entry book-keeping, although some of them have pointed out the existence of widespread doubts on the practicality and effectiveness of this technique.
16 For an English example, Michael Turner, J. V. Beckett, and Bethanie Afton, Farm production in England 1700–1914 (2001), p. 49. This penchant has created a degree of bias in the literature.
17 The English language accounting history literature is relatively abundant in general as is the agricultural history of accounting, which may also contribute to this bias, as DEB had been adopted at an early date by merchants and then transferred to the large estates of England and Scotland. Edwards corrected this view by showing that during the nineteenth century, French writers considerably advanced the study of cost accounting in relation to agriculture, Ronald S. Edwards, ‘A survey of French contributions to the study of cost accounting during the nineteenth century’, repr. in Yannick Lemarchand and Robert Parker (eds), Accounting in France: Historical essays/études historiques (1996), pp. 155–90. Textbooks that advocate single-entry book-keeping have received very little attention, especially those originating from non-academic writers. In her study of the popular manuals that received prizes from the French Ministry of Agriculture during the July Monarchy, Joly has shown the existence of a body of ‘enlightened landowners’ presenting their views on accounting systems adapted to medium-sized and small properties. These were sometimes only simple income and expenditure accounts supplemented by a few auxiliary books for tracking production, but the methods were apparently being put into practice on their own lands.
18 Joly, ‘Educating in economic calculus’. Critiques of the DEB technique began to increase in the second half of the nineteenth century. The French controversy surrounding Mathieu de Dombasle’s accounting model was a striking example: it gave rise to over forty-five articles in the professional press and bitterly divided some fifteen authors (scholars and landowners) over a seven-year period starting in the early 1870s.
19 Yannick Lemarchand, Yves Levant, and Henri Zimnovitch, ‘“Schisme à Grignon”: Autour de la comptabilité agricole, durant les années 1870’, Entreprises et histoire 88 (2017), p. 37. A similar controversy took place in Switzerland.
20 Juri Auderset and Peter Moser, Die Agrarfrage in der Industriegesellschaft: Wissenskulturen, Machtverhältnisse und natürliche Ressourcen in der agrarisch-industriellen Wissensgesellschaft (1850–1950) (2018), p. 61. Debates on the appropriate kind of accounting to be taught to farmers continued into the early twentieth century, with the emphasis on systems of simplified accounting for the use of smallholders apparently growing, especially in the German-speaking countries.
21 See, for instance in the classic texts: Sigmund von Frauendorfer, Ideengeschichte der Agrarwirtschaft und Agrarpolitik im deutschen Sprachgebiet: Von den Anfängen bis zum ersten Weltkrieg (1957) and Joosep Nõu, The development of agricultural economics in Europe (1967). While farm accounting theory of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been discussed mostly as part of the broader literature on agricultural economics, itself not very abundant, two topics have nevertheless been highlighted by the historiography of farm accounting: costing, especially in relation to the intricacies of mixed farming, and land valuation.
22 Roger Juchau and Paul Hill, ‘Agricultural cost accounting development in Britain: The contributions of three men from Wye: A review note’, Accounting, Business and Financial History 8 (1998), pp. 165–74. Retrospectively introducing the German debate to his readers in the US, Karl Brandt singled out these two topics as the main battlefield of agricultural economists.
23 Karl Brandt, ‘Land valuation in Germany’, Journal of Farm Economics 19 (1937), pp. 173–87. Costing, which appeared as a problem in agricultural accounting as early as the eighteenth century, developed from the late nineteenth century and had an obvious impact on decisions about crops and technologies.
24 According to Lemarchand, Levant, and Zimnovitch, agricultural accounting books published at the beginning of the nineteenth century in France had ‘a level of reflection and a degree of sophistication exceeding what we then encounter in industrial accounting manuals’, Lemarchand, Levant, and Zimnovitch, ‘“Schisme à Grignon”’, p. 38. The importance of the debates on land valuation, a large part of the farm’s capital, was stressed by Walter Achilles and more recently by D’Onofrio, who showed how valuation theory underpinned the political position of German landowners and Italian fascists.
25 Walter Achilles, ‘Betriebswirtschaftliche Leitbilder in der ostdeutschen Gutswirtschaft seit dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Heinz Reif (ed.), Ostelbische agrargesellschaft im Kaiserreich und in der weimarer Republik: Agrarkrise – junkerliche Interessenpolitik – Modernisierungstrategien (1994), pp. 190–212. For a similar argument: Federico D’Onofrio, ‘The microfoundations of Italian agrarianism: Italian agricultural economists and fascism’, Agricultural History 91 (2017), p. 369. On land valuation, see also the discussion of Ernesto Marenghi, in Alberto Gabba (ed.), Aspetti evolutivi della scienza estimativa: Seminario in onore di Ernesto Marenghi (1995).This dynamism in accounting thought may seem, however, to be in contrast with actual practices. The question of whether accounting books were read outside the limited circle of agronomists, large landowners, and professional accountants is difficult to answer, but James Fisher’s analysis of agricultural books can be applied more generally to the literature of accounting of the early modern and modern period.
26 James D. Fisher, The enclosure of knowledge: Books, power and agrarian capitalism in Britain, 1660–1800 (2022). In both cases, the aim was to reform rural practices, that is to impose the views of an intellectual elite on the mass of practitioners. Such a project was obviously bound to cause misunderstandings and even rejection. There is also an epistemological question that relates to ‘the technical difficulties in the development and use of written knowledge, requiring the translation from practice to text, then back into practice; both the codification of a practical art and the decoding of written instructions’.
27 Ibid., pp. 15–16. It may be argued that accounting techniques, unlike knowledge about crops and nutrients, avoid the problem of adapting generic knowledge to a specific local environment, which is a major difficulty for agronomic knowledge. But the question nevertheless arises of the gap between the logic of design, which aims for an ideal of formal rigour, and the logic of use, by nature idiosyncratic and depending on practical contingencies. The work in the following section provides an insight into the heterogeneous rationales of accounting practice.