VI
The chapters collected in this volume do not exhaust the topic of farm accounting. On the contrary, they are intended to open the way for further research. We have identified at least three areas that require deeper exploration. First, there is a need for a reassessment of the role of double-entry book-keeping in prescriptive writings and in practice. Various forms of simplified accounting seem to have dominated accounting practices during the early modern and modern era and well into the twentieth century. In terms of sources, this reassessment requires us to pay renewed attention to the accounting literature aimed at farmers and smallholders, rather than the rarefied treatises of the great agronomists.
Second, besides moving the focus away from DEB, current research shows the promise of adopting comprehensive definitions of accounting, capable of encompassing different calculative practices and forms of inscription that are not necessarily familiar or recognisable to professional accountants. The relationship to the commercial accounting of the same period remains unclear, while the tailoring of accounting systems to suit the needs of the farming business, especially within the framework of educational initiatives, emerges as a crucial topic in this book. Research is therefore required on the different genres of accounting literature and their different publics: educators, professional accountants, farmers.
Third, the relationship between practices and prescriptions also deserves further analysis. Too little is known about the transmission of practices and where models were taught and learned. This points to the need to explore new and often neglected sources for the history of accounting in the early modern and modern era: professional journals with widespread readership, the submissions and jury reports of prizes, the discussions among members of rural societies and academies, and especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the records of farmers’ associations.
In this way it will be possible to track how the gap between norms and the actual activity of farmers was negotiated and became redefined in different historical contingencies, but we may also be able to see the structure of incentives offered to farmers: improved management, increased control, clearer relations with siblings and extended family members, to mention a few.