IV
A distinction appears in the historiography between the accounting of estate holders and that of yeomen, farmers, or sharecroppers, the former often highly formalised while the latter was more narrative in form.
1 The difference between yeomen, farmers, and sharecroppers relates to their different land tenure. Yeomen are farmers who work on their own land, farmers in this restricted sense are renting the land by paying a monetary rent, while sharecroppers shared harvest with their landlords. As Turner, Beckett, and Afton claimed in the case of England in the early modern period (but similar observations can be found elsewhere), farmers produced not only fewer records, but also different records. The authors stressed the correlation between the type of holding and the characteristics of farm records: farm records were ‘individualistic’ or even ‘idiosyncratic’ when farmers were autonomously running their farm, but became increasingly formalised with the need for accountability, whenever farmers or farm bailiffs were reporting to an owner or an estate administration.
2 Turner, Beckett, and Afton, Farm production in England, 1700–1914, p. 51. A similar connection between accountability and the abundance of records due to tenancy systems was detected in early modern and modern Tuscany by Reginaldo Cianferoni, ‘Gli antichi libri contabili delle fattorie quali fonti della storia dell’agricoltura e dell’economia toscana: Metodi e problemi della loro utilizzazione’, Storia dell’agricoltura 13 (1973), pp. 47–76.Accounting historians have therefore often focused on the relatively sophisticated accounting systems of complex, market-oriented estates. They have insisted that the new calculative mentalities and practices were inscribed in the general transformation of European agriculture that began, arguably, in the late seventeenth century.
Large aristocratic estates of this period were often managed from a distance and thus developed a variety of forms of record keeping and control mechanisms.
3 David Oldroyd, Estates, enterprise and investment at the dawn of the industrial revolution: Estate management and accounting in the north-east of England, c. 1700–1780 (2017); Valerio Antonelli et al., ‘The roles of accounting in agro-pastoral settings: The case of the landed estates of Prince Sambiase in the mid-eighteenth century’, Accounting Historians Journal 46 (2019), pp. 1–18. Scholars have examined the accounting practices associated with the evolution of the manorial system and of the relationships between the landlord, the bailiff, or the tenant at the turn of the agricultural revolution. Performance measurement was twofold: it focused on the estate’s production and on the agent’s behaviour, as the latter was accountable for his decisions.
4 P. D. A. Harvey, ‘Manorial accounts’, in R. H. Parker and B. S. Yamey (eds), Accounting history: Some British contributions (1994), pp. 91–115. Thus the study of accounts and their associated correspondence provides information on the ways in which supervision was exercised (and how the agent tried to protect himself from supervision), as much as on the productivity of the land, the amount of the rents, the surplus, and a variety of daily concerns. The study of sharecroppers’ accounts held by landowners in western France during the eighteenth century confirms the relationship between surviving records and reporting. Annie Antoine found it was landowners who kept accounts and naturally they focused on the owner’s share. Accounts therefore appear as part of the informative infrastructure of tenancy.
5 Antoine, ‘Entre macro et micro’. In Italy and Spain, sharecropping contracts created the conditions for the production and survival of the complex accounts of the large estates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
6 Jordi Planas and Enric Saguer, ‘Accounting records of large rural estates and the dynamics of agriculture in Catalonia (Spain), 1850–1950’, Accounting, Business & Financial History 15 (2005), pp. 171–85; Riccardo Mussari and Michela Magliacani, ‘Agricultural accounting in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: The case of the noble Rucellai family farm in Campi’, Accounting, Business and Financial History 17 (2007), pp. 87–103; Marie-Lucie Rossi, ‘Une entreprise agricole à la recherche du profit optimum: La Casa Spalletti en Italie au XIXe siècle’, Comptabilités: Revue d’histoire des comptabilités https://journals.openedition.org/comptabilites/1349; idem, ‘Les archives agricoles de la Casa Spalletti en Italie (1821–1922): Conserver pour entreprendre’, Gazette des archives 213 (2009), pp. 103–17.While some of these estates adopted double-entry book-keeping, a majority of the farm businesses which have been studied kept single-entry registers. In England, for instance, charge and discharge accounting remained usual and dominates the surviving accounts.
7 Harvey, ‘Manorial accounts’. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain and Tuscany, in the context of large commercially oriented estates, single-entry books prevailed amongst the sources. In the case of Tuscany, as well as Catalonia, whilst the accounts could be analysed in order to reveal the profitability of farms and crops, their main role seems to have been to track the relations between the different actors of production: landlords, administrators, farmers, in line with the person-focused accounting systems of the period. Even where double-entry book-keeping was adopted, it was part of a broader system of record-keeping. Antonelli
et al., for instance, highlight the use of tallies on the southern Italian domains of the Prince of Sambiase, whose administration employed both very advanced and very primitive tools for record-keeping.
8 Antonelli et al., ‘The roles of accounting in agro-pastoral settings’.The questions posed by the accounting records of farmers who did not report to a landlord are distinctive. The idiosyncratic nature of their book-keeping may well have hindered their study by economic historians. The absence of basic information, deemed unnecessary to be recorded by the farmer (such as hectares owned, number of workers under his roof) makes it impossible to calculate farm productivity and performance. The muddled arrangement of the records frequently makes them difficult to understand and use. Where farm accountants were both scholars and scrupulous managers, as much as they were writers and fervent prescribers, accounting practice loses some of its obscurity, making it possible for the historian to employ exceptional sets of records such as those of the model farms of Moëglin, Roville, Hofwyl, Sampford Hall, and so on.
9 Respectively by Albrecht Thaer, Matthieu de Dombasle, Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg, and Arthur Young. The accounting records of the ordinary farmer, by contrast, remain difficult to get to grips with, and somewhat bewildering.
10 Unlike the historian, the ethnographer can benefit from the commentary of living authors to decipher the inscriptions of ordinary records and to penetrate the cognitive reasoning based on them. For example, Joly has shown how farmers build up a routine calendar by noting their work activities and the weather, through discussions of the contents of diaries (kept around the mid-twentieth century) with their owners, Nathalie Joly, ‘Écrire l’événement: Le travail agricole mis en mémoire’, Sociologie du travail 46 (2004), pp. 511–27. Turner, Beckett, and Afton have also questioned the farmers’ commitment to financial accounting:
Evidence of a pragmatic attitude of farmers to their records can be found in the printed account books. While these provided space for all aspects of agricultural production, many farmers felt no obligation to fill in the columns and pages. Thus, even these printed volumes demonstrate the fact that farm records are highly individualistic documents.
11 Turner, Beckett, and Afton, Farm production in England, 1700–1914, p. 62. Similar remarks, underlining the informal, idiosyncratic, unsystematic character of surviving accounts of independent farmers (and the importance of Anschreibebuecher) can be found in Walter Achilles, ‘Landwirtschaft in der frühen Neuzeit’, in Landwirtschaft in der frühen Neuzeit (2010), pp. 76–7; Thijs Lambrecht, ‘Reciprocal exchange, credit and cash: Agricultural labour markets and local economies in the southern Low Countries during the eighteenth century’, Continuity and Change 18 (2003), pp. 237–61.The accounts (1697–1745) of an English yeoman farmer discussed by Lee and Osborne are representative of these overly complex sources.
12 Geoffrey A. Lee and Richard H. Osborne, ‘The account book of a Derbyshire farm of the eighteenth century’, Accounting, Business and Financial History 4 (1994), pp. 147–62. The jumbling of debit and credit entries in a ledger kept over two generations disturbed the two historians. Noting the chasm that separates this day-by-day account entry from the standard bilateral recording form, they see it as a form of ‘primitive accounting’, whose main interest lies at a socio-historical level rather than an economic one.
In fact, this does not mean that independent farmers were necessarily less profit-oriented than estate-holders but they gave additional functions to their records, for instance recording goods and services paid for by barter,
13 For Densmore, given the prevalence of barter in the rural economy in early nineteenth-century America, ‘it is hard to imagine how any farmer or artisan could have functioned without a bookkeeping system’. Christopher Densmore, ‘Understanding and using early nineteenth-century account books’, The Midwestern Archivist 5 (1980), p. 5. deferred payment agreements with partners, discounts granted, work done or to be done, and so on.
14 For a stimulating reflection on the possible uses of the ordering of words and things into farm registers, see Sylvie Mouysset, ‘Penser/classer: La passion de la liste dans quelques livres de raison du Midi de la France à l’époque moderne’, in Michel Cassan, Jean-Pierre Bardet, and François-Joseph Ruggiu (eds), Les écrits du for privé: Objets matériels, objets édités: actes du colloque de Limoges, 17 et 18 novembre 2005 (2007), pp. 151–66. For example, the ledger of a moderately wealthy French farmer, François Jacques Maret, who was running a wide range of activities (farming, vineyards, fish, services) in the eighteenth century, reveals an entrepreneur well aware of his profits and losses. He wanted to know exactly how much he was able to borrow (and repay) from various creditors to support his speculations in sheep farming.
15 Bernard Bodinier, ‘Un journal paysan du XVIIIe siècle: Le livre de recettes et dépenses de François Jacques Maret, laboureur et vigneron à Bueil (Eure), de 1730 à 1761. 1ère partie’, Histoire & Sociétés Rurales 40 (2013), pp. 97–154.Indeed, it is other branches of history (rural history and cultural history) and related disciplines (rural sociology and ethnology) which have extensively studied farm accounts in all their diverse forms and functions. Today, we have solid evidence of practices that spread throughout agriculture as literacy levels rose, with accounts kept in narrative form first by intermediate social groups (ploughmen) during the eighteenth century, then by the broadest strata of the peasantry from the second half of the nineteenth century. Scholars have scrutinised the contents of the
livres de raison (France),
16 In France, the syntheses available do not specifically focus on the landowners’ livres de raison. However, historians have offered monographic studies of examples of these documents found in public or private archives. For a review of these works, see Nathalie Joly, Thomas Depecker, and Julie Labatut, ‘L’entreprise agricole et sa gestion: Ethos, structures et instruments (XIXe–XXe siècle)’, Entreprises et Histoire 88 (2017), pp. 6–20. the
Anschreibebücher (Germany),
17 Hopf-Droste proposed this term of ‘Anschreibebuch’ to describe a mode of writing usually adopted by peasant farmers, as much as in the merchants’ profession since the fifteenth century with the keeping of the ‘Memorial’, that is a document which recorded transactions chronologically, without any thematic ordering. Marie-Luise Hopf-Droste, ‘Vorbilder, Formen und Funktionen ländlicher Anschreibebücher’, in Helmut Ottenjann and Günter Wiegelmann (eds), Alte Tagebücher und Anschreibebücher: Quellen zum Alltag der ländlichen Bevölkerung in Nordwesteuropa (1982), pp. 61–84. the
ricordi and
ricordanze (Italy),
18 Raul Mordenti, I libri di famiglia in Italia, II, Geografia e Storia (2001) and idem, ‘Les livres de famille en Italie’, Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales 59 (2004), pp. 785–804. and the the day-books or diaries
(America and other countries)
19 For America (southern Minnesota in the years 1856–76), see Rodney C. Loehr, ‘Farmers’ diaries: Their interest and value as historical sources’, Agricultural History 12 (1938), pp. 313–25; Everett E. Edwards, ‘Agricultural records; Their nature and value for research’, Agricultural History 13 (1939), pp. 1–12. See B. H. Slicher van Bath, ‘Accounts and diaries of farmers before 1800’, Afdeling Agrarische Geschiedenis Bijdragen 8 (1962), pp. 5–33. kept by farmers. Mouysset reminds us that these genres of writing obey ‘a set of writing rules established in the fifteenth century and maintained until the nineteenth century, from Pacioli to Napoleon, permanently shaping the writing of accounts’.
20 Sylvie Mouysset, Papiers de famille: Introduction à l’étude des livres de raison (France, XVe–XIXe s.) (2007), p. 37. In fact, the
livre de raison was organised in a similar way to the
brouillard.In the
brouillard or
memorial, also called main-courante from the end of the eighteenth century (
memoriale or
squartafolio in Italy,
memorial or
borrador in Spain,
waste book in Great Britain), all transactions are recorded in chronological order and in narrative form, without necessarily worrying about the accounts concerned and how they will be moved.
21 Yannick Lemarchand, ‘Journal-livre journal (XVIIIs.)’, in Didier Bensadon, Nicolas Praquin, and Béatrice Touchelay (eds), Dictionnaire historique de comptabilité des entreprises (2016), pp. 389–90. By examining eighteenth-century trade dictionaries, Joly demonstrated that
… the use of the compound words ‘
agenda-mémorial’ or ‘
agenda-brouillard’ reflected traders’ habit of recording their transactions in a pocket-sized document, the
agenda, and this use made its way into agriculture, with treatises on rural accounting of the nineteenth century recommending to keep a waste book.
22 Nathalie Joly, ‘L’organisation comptable dans les grandes exploitations françaises (XVIIe s.-milieu XIXe s.)’, in Bensadon et al. (eds), Dictionnaire historique de comptabilité des entreprises, pp. 438–41. For an account of French agricultural treatises recommending the use of the ‘livre de raison’ from the end of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries and their role in the private economy and in regulating the conduct of daily life, see Jean-Marie Barbier, Le quotidien et son économie (1981), pp. 19–54.The historiography on peasant diaries is relatively extensive throughout Europe.
23 German works have been well considered in Klaus-Joachim Lorenzen-Schmidt and Bjørn Poulsen (eds), Bäuerliche Anschreibebücher als Quellen zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte (1992). For a more recent overview, see Prass, ‘Les écrits personnels de paysans et l’histoire économique’, in Delleaux (ed.), La plume et la terre, pp. 27–46. It sparked a discussion concerning the specific nature of ‘daily accounts’, which has been more recently revived by studies of ‘moral accounting’ as a tool for improving character and regulating behaviour based on objective calculations.
24 Harro Maas, ‘Letts calculate: Moral accounting in the Victorian period’, History of Political Economy 48, suppl. 1 (2016), pp. 16–43; idem, ‘Monitoring the self: François-Marc-Louis Naville and his moral tables’, History of Science 58 (2020), pp. 117–41. To encourage this daily writing habit, almanacks and pocket diaries were made widely available. Agriculture was not left behind. As early as the end of the nineteenth century, publishers and agricultural unions began distributing inexpensive books in these formats specifically designed for farmers and their wives.
25 To take a French example, ‘the nascent and soon powerful Union du Sud-est des syndicats agricoles (1892) took over the publishing of an almanack, whose circulation reached 20,000 the following year and which sold at 10 centimes’. The number of copies produced annually soared to several hundred thousand. Nathalie Joly, ‘Shaping records on the farm: Agricultural record keeping in France from the nineteenth century to the Liberation’, Agricultural History Review 59 (2011), p. 71. Their success continued unabated throughout Europe during the twentieth century.
26 In Italy, see Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro, ‘Readings for farmers: Agrarian almanacs in Italy from the eighteenth to the twentieth century’, Agricultural History Review 63 (2015), pp. 243–64. Although the dissemination of these tools is part of a desire to discipline economic behaviour, it is not limited to it (a point elaborated in chapter seven in this volume on ‘Women that Count’). The ‘chronicles’ that the use of an agenda or almanack encouraged on the farm gradually became ‘a way for learning about and reflecting on farm work’.
27 Nathalie Joly, ‘Vaches et blés sur le papier: Socialisations à l’écrit du monde agricole’, Communication & Langages 1 (2009), pp. 77–90.We would like to insist on the distinction between practices and models. As Hoggart established with regard to the working class and its reception of instructions from the mass media,
28 Richard Hoggart, The uses of literacy: Aspects of working-class life (1967). landowners and farmers paid only ‘oblique attention’ to the models of accounts proposed to them. Their conduct revealed a casual adherence to prescriptions, with some of the recommended techniques being readily adopted while others were kept at arm’s length or even rejected outright. Moreover, the uses that rural elites and scholars saw for book-keeping were not the same as those that motivated landowners to keep accounts. Christopher Napier suggested that for aristocratic landowners accounting was subservient to the maintenance of patterns of conspicuous consumption, rather than a means for the assessment of profit.
29 Christopher J. Napier, ‘Aristocratic accounting: The Bute Estate in Glamorgan, 1814–1880’, Accounting and Business Research 21 (1991), p. 164. Certainly maintaining accounts did not prevent aristocrats from overspending and in some cases going bankrupt. For middling and small farms, with little room for manoeuvre, and more subject to fluctuations in harvests, labour costs, and crop prices, their accounts could well be seen as a safeguard against dishonesty in commercial transactions, as payments were rarely made immediately in cash but at the end of periods of credit. And for those who wanted to round out their assets, consolidate or improve their income, and then invest, accounting was certainly one of the surest ways to success. Plus, the social respect conferred by well-kept accounts may also have motivated those with entrepreneurial ambitions, as in the case of François Jacques Maret, the ploughman mentioned earlier. Ultimately, accounting norms seemed to be fully integrated into the pattern of lives and social experience.
Efforts to spread formal accounting through the educational system at all levels gained momentum throughout the nineteenth century (particularly in its second half) and into the early twentieth century.
30 On the Tuscan Colle Meleto, Rossano Pazzagli, ‘Scuole d’agricoltura e poderi sperimentali: Agronomia, istruzione e progresso tecnico nella prima meta dell’800’ (Thesis Fiesole, European University Institute, 1989). The historiography of the modernisation of agriculture tracks these efforts, stressing the role of farmers’ associations and extension services.
31 Harm Zwarts, ‘Knowledge, networks and niches: Dutch agricultural innovation in an international perspective, c. 1880–1970’ (Thesis, Wageningen University, 2021), p. 109, who also defends the usefulness of accounting for farmers, relying on the work of Peter Jones on Scotland, Paul Sharp and Markus Lampe on Denmark, and Merijn Knibe and Marijn Molema on Frisland. Scholars tend to postulate the adoption of these new practices as an element in the productivity increase that characterised the ‘first European green revolution’ from the late nineteenth century onwards.
32 Lampe and Sharp, ‘Quest for Useful Knowledge’, p. 74. Nevertheless, this reasoning has been reversed by Daan Hendrikx and Oscar Gelderblom, who questioned the actual contribution provided by formalised accounting practices (DEB in particular) to the growth of agricultural productivity and claimed that smallholders, unlike estate owners, ‘kept track of operations through mental accounting, as often as not supported by simple recordings in private notebooks or the accounts kept by local shopkeepers, artisans, and other suppliers’.
33 Daan Hendrikx and Oscar Gelderblom, ‘Accounting for agricultural development? The case of the Netherlands, 1840–1940’, Agricultural History Review 70 (2022), pp. 23–48. If the utility of accounting for the management of small farms can be questioned, how do we explain its importance in the thinking of experts and farmers’ leaders?
Accounting historians have underlined the growing role of organisations and institutions outside the farm or the estate. Studies of nineteenth-century estates in Italy have shown the importance of legally mandatory prescriptions (
libretto colonico), but the role of the government seems to have generally grown, not only in Europe and not only through direct regulations. As part of the general effort to ‘govern the rural’,
34 Liesbeth van de Grift and Amalia Ribi Forclaz (eds), Governing the rural in interwar Europe (2017). policies increasingly required farmers to keep accounts in order to receive subsidies and participate in the broader processes of economic centralisation. Stephen Walker thus highlighted the importance of farm accounting in supporting the policies of the New Deal,
35 Stephen P. Walker, ‘Accounting and rural rehabilitation in New Deal America’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 39 (2014), pp. 208–35. while Hendrikx and Gelderblom stressed the importance of government pressure, rather than the internal managerial needs of the farm, as a driver for the adoption of financial accounting practices amongst the middle strata of Dutch farmers. According to them, it was the introduction of an income tax that generalised the use of tools to calculate profit. More radically, Martha Lampland, looking at socialist Hungary, has argued that recording practices may be useful even when the numbers returned are false, because of their significance within the system of planning.
36 Martha Lampland, ‘False numbers as formalizing practices’, Social Studies of Science 40 (2010), pp. 377–404.There are thus contrasting analyses of the links between the development of accounting and the modernisation process, and dissenting interpretations of the roles of social actors. This volume covers the whole range of different approaches.