This paper investigates managerial ideas and accounting notions developing at the Venetian state shipyard, the Arsenul, in the turn of the 16th century, with three major elements of interest. First, it shows the existence of rather sophisticated managerial and accounting discourse in the Renaissance period, where modern forms of management through accounting can be highlighted inside the 'Venetian method'. Second, it allows for an understanding of the evolution of accounting discourse over time: in the particular time span under investigation (1580-1643) new concepts and notions emerged, coupled with new ways of talking about managing issues through emerging accounting concepts (the invention of the idea of work in progress; costing expertise and other calculative practices). Third, it shows how a modern form of economic discourse gradually established itself in the face of hostile social and moral norms. The event under investigation describes a process in which the formal meaning of the economic (Polanyi, 1977) took place, with its associated moral imperative of organising and economising, conflicting to a large extent with social order. Though the term efficiency never appears in the documents, its ethos and pathos are there, fostered by accounting and discourse about managing.

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Research in accounting history is overwhelmingly dominated by studies addressing Anglo-Saxon settings of the period 1850-1940. In spite of the many perceptive insights arising from those investigations, such a tiny time-space intersection overlooks other historiographies that are equally important to advance understanding in accounting history. This article calls for mapping variety in the history of accounting and management practices by expanding the dimensions of time (i.e., history of the present but also of proto-industrial settings and ancient history) and space (i.e., Africa, Continental Europe, Islam, Latin-America, etc) that characterize present focus of accounting history research.

This paper aims to aid our understanding of the emergence of accounting as a control instrument in complex proto-industrial settings, through its perceived capacity of mirroring the production process. The paper starts off from an archival document, the 1586 deliberation by the Venetian Senate, which imposed on the Arsenal a stocktaking to be conducted every three years, and ad hoc galley production accounts to be kept in double entry format, where the passage of materials and work-in-process between units were recorded both in physical quantity and value. In this deliberation the Venetian Senate was clearly posing explicitly the problem of costing and the efficient use of resources within the Arsenal. Until then, the Senate controlled this organisation only by limiting the funds allocated to activities (wages, oars, 'stuffs') without entering into the substance of the operations. Two interrelated investigations are carried out. First, a content analysis of the 1586 document is made. Second, the question of its 'impact' on the Arsenal's actual accounting practices is addressed. In a 1633 Report by Alvise Molin, a magistrate of the Republic, some elements of the 1586 deliberation seem to surface, insofar as a quite sophisticated calculation of the production costs of galleys is provided. In this sense it might well be that the notion of cost emerged as a sort of 'accidental by-product' of the Senate's efforts aimed at introducing tighter forms of control on the Arsenal.

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