V

The first part of the book shows the remarkable complexity of the models proposed to farmers by advocates and practitioners of accounting since the eighteenth century. In the wake of pioneering works on the capitalist rationalisation of the farm published at the dawn of the nineteenth century,2 Depecker and Joly, ‘Agronomists and accounting’; Joly, ‘Educating in economic calculus’. the chapters track the process of rationalisation initiated at varying speeds across Europe from the late eighteenth century onwards, with a focus on accounting. Fisher evokes the classic principal–agent problem, by showing how accounting, in the work of Arthur Young and William Marshall, was meant to enable a closer control of the workforce and of the bailiffs, and locates such practices in the context of the capitalist transformation of English agriculture in the eighteenth century. In his Marxist perspective, capitalism corresponds to a particular configuration of labour relations. Improved accounting represented a key technique for labour management. The quest for an improved efficiency of farming, though, did not only affect the relationships between owners, managers, and workers but extended to the relations between managers and labourers.

Indeed, the accountability of farm or estate managers to the landlord, whether the English gentleman or the German aristocrat, emerges as a main driver not just of accounting theory, as in Young and Marshall, but also of the actual practice. Scholten-Buschhoff puts the Rentmeister at the core of her analysis of the rationalisation and formalisation of the management of manorial estates in Germany. Through the examination of the records of five aristocratic estates in Westphalia and Rhineland between 1650 and 1850, Scholten-Buschhoff tracks the managerial innovations which led to greater transparency and uniformity in the administration of the estate. In particular, she stresses how rationalisation and formalisation accelerated from the eighteenth century, with the establishment of double-entry book-keeping and commercial accounting. She restates the importance of interpreting accounts within a broader constellation of sources, especially correspondence, by showing how the reporting of manager to landowner intensified and landlords tried to exert a stricter control over their properties.

In Hoyle’s chapter we see instead another aspect of the rationalisation of farming, namely the experiments conducted by Young. As a study by Roger Juchau demonstrates, cost accounting was crucial to assess the profitability of different farming systems and the various innovations that Young and other protagonists of the ‘agricultural enlightenment’ advocated.3 Juchau, ‘Early cost accounting ideas in agriculture: The contributions of Arthur Young’, Accounting, Business & Financial History 12,3 (2002), 369–86’. Hoyle continues by discussing aspects of the advocacy and use of farm accounts in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, stressing the gulf in practice between common farmers and farms run by bailiffs who accounted to their employers.

The topics of the second part of this book extend well into the nineteenth century and demonstrate that the relationship between modernisation, rationalisation, and accounting practices was far from univocal, with multiple needs, amongst them improved farm management, converging in the adoption of sophisticated accounting techniques. Fulgence Delleaux describes the exceptional complexity of the accounting system adopted by the landholding families around Geneva in the early eighteenth century. While he deals with the accounts of some of the major personalities of the city during the Enlightenment, Delleaux explains the extraordinarily intricate and very comprehensive record systems of the patricians in terms of religious needs rather than managerial necessity.

It would be a mistake though to imagine that the stricto sensu agricultural business can be insulated from the increasingly industrial society that surrounded it. As Laurent Herment shows in his chapter, farm accounting may reveal the integration of the farm into broader production processes. Its results can therefore only be interpreted in the light of the other interests of their owners. Herment’s meticulous examination of the records of two farms owned by Adolphe Dailly over the 1860s enables him to demonstrate that the accounting principles adopted on the farms only made sense when the farms are considered as being integrated into the other parts of Dailly’s business empire, including his interests in Parisian public transport.

Nathalie Joly’s chapter serves as a link between the first two parts of the book and the third. She shows how the political imperatives of modernising the middling peasantry became pre-eminent in the first half of the nineteenth century in France. The chapter examines the educational literature being circulated, especially that directed to women and girls in farming families from the second half of the eighteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth. It describes how, especially in the 1820s and 1830s, an increasing number of books (authored by both men and women) on the topic of the contribution of women to the economy of the farm provided models of simple accounting techniques in an attempt, Joly argues, to familiarise women with the idea of profit and in turn to adapt and integrate family farms into a modern economy. Such literature, which is overall essentially prescriptive, is, however, not uniform: some writers underpinned the agency of women where others tried to use women to buttress the masculine order of nineteenth-century society.

These publications are therefore to be considered within the framework of a general effort to improve the conditions of the peasantry and transform farming through the moral and technical education of the masses. Unlike the treatises by the great agronomists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this literature did not target estate holders and administrators, but was aimed at common farmers (including farming women). In this context, handbooks tended to consider double-entry book-keeping to be too complicated and cumbersome for the farmer, whether male or female. It was therefore either discarded altogether or presented as the final, most advanced, step in the progression of the farmer’s accounting skills. While this literature proliferated and sold massively, especially in the second half of the century, it remains difficult, as Joly stresses, to ascertain how far its lessons were absorbed and the practices it recommended adopted.

The effort the European ruling classes put into compelling peasants to keep accounts is the thread running through the remaining chapters. In the third part, the chapters by D’Onofrio (on Switzerland and the Netherlands), Moser (on Switzerland) and by Lampe and Sharp (on Denmark) show the growing role of governments and farmers’ organisations in efforts to make farming transparent and governable. In all three chapters, we see the active spread of models of accounting through the organisation of courses and the supervision of farmers. Farmers were encouraged to separate book-keeping – the everyday recording of facts – from accounting – as the technique for extracting management information from their records. This division enabled accounting-related tasks to be taken out of the farm and placed in the hands of specialised accounting offices, often created by government.

These chapters respond in part to the questions raised by Hendrikx and Gelderblom on the usefulness of farm accounting for middle farmers and smallholders.4 Daan Hendrikx and Oscar Gelderblom, ‘Accounting for agricultural development?’ Calculative practices appear as part of the organisational requirements of rural life, an element of what Anton Schuurman, in his analysis of Dutch agriculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, called the ‘institutional matrix’.5 Anton Schuurman, ‘Agricultural policy and the Dutch agricultural institutional matrix during the transition from organized to disorganized capitalism’, in Peter Moser and Peter Varey (eds), Integration through subordination: The politics of agricultural modernisation in industrial Europe (2013), pp. 65–84. Issues of farmers’ education, of the diffusion, and adoption of practices by individual agriculturalists are considered to be less significant than the imposition of standard procedures. The structure of incentives and the balancing of the interests of various social groups and actors (governments, unions, experts, farmers) come to the fore.

In the three chapters dedicated to the twentieth century, we see accounting in a broader social role as the convergence point of different interests.6 Stuart Burchell et al., ‘The role of accounting in organizations and society’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 5 (1980), pp. 5–27. What seems to characterise the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries is a much more interventionist role for governments and for those farmers’ organisations that were established or radically renewed at the end of the nineteenth century. For them, accounting was a tool of direct control and part of the policy-making process, but for the farmers themselves it was a tool of empowerment. It enabled them to regulate their relations with their kin (the division of estates on inheritance features prominently in the Swiss case discussed by Moser). It helped them with tax issues (as stressed by D’Onofrio) and allowed them to be part of complex production systems (Lampe and Sharp). Finally, through their collective organisations, information drawn from farm accounts was turned into statistical data that provided farmers with a voice in public affairs (D’Onofrio).