Contesting the Indigenous Development of 'Chinese Double-Entry Bookkeeping' and its Significance in China's Economic Institutions and Business Organization Before c.1850

Abstract

Abstract*The recent rapid growth of China's economy has reopened historical debate about the extent to which it prospered during the Míng and Qīng dynasties through developing a significant market orientation on the base of its underlying agricultural bureaucratic feudalism. As a contribution to this debate, we question here the extent to which there is justification for claims concerning the development of a concomitant and indigenous Chinese form of double-entry bookkeeping (CDEB)-seen as having developed among bankers, merchants and proto-industrialists-and for its significance within such a market economy. Given that discussion on post-medieval European accounting history indicates that there is not necessarily a direct and positive connection between the development of Italian double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) and associated practices of entity accounting, and the development from the sixteenth century of Western capitalism, we argue that caution should be exercised in drawing any analogous connection in the Chinese context. But equally we wish to raise a more foundational issue concerning the similarities and differences between the knowledge worlds within which DEB and CDEB emerged, as a means to better reading the specific historical practices and discourses of each. We therefore review the invention and dissemination of western DEB as a technology emerging within a textually and semiotically changing knowledge world in the Latin West from the twelfth century AD, and consider how the evidence for the development and use of CDEB may then be reviewed in the context of the Chinese knowledge world. As part of such a reading, we focus on tracing possible intercultural linkages between the Western and Chinese developments across the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. In this way we seek to problematise conventional 1 Visiting Professor, Essex Business School, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK hoskin357@gmail.com 2 Emeritus Professor, Department of Accounting, London School of Economics, London WC2A 2AE, UK R.Macve@lse.ac.uk 2 formulations of the respective significance of both DEB and CDEB, while acknowledging that, at the current moment of such transcultural historical study, the mechanisms of translation and diffusion of practices and discourses generally remain obscure and inconclusive until the era of the transformation of China's modern economy in recent decades. There remains a clear need for further research utilising primary archival sources to test the arguments developed in the existing research literatures, and here.

The evolution of bookkeeping methods in China: A Darwinist analysis of developments during the twentieth-century

“…Therefore, all transactions can be viewed as exchanges of property rights between debtors and creditors in the debit-credit method. This is also our answer to one of the critiques of Hoskin and Macve (2011).…”

The farm as an accounting laboratory: an essay on the history of accounting and agriculture

“…The history of accounting books would benefit from taking inspiration from the recent 'history of the book' (Darnton 1982;Johns 1998) and, more generally, media studies (Kafka 2012;Kirschenbaum 2008), in their careful analysis of the involved paper artefacts -of their production, circulation, reception and conservation. One of the notable consequences of the diffusion of paper and of writing is the availability, today, of more abundant sources for historians of accounting from that period on -as early as the first century BC in China (Hoskin and Macve 2012;Hoskin, Ma and Macve 2013;Ji 2003); from the seven hundreds in the Islamic world (Napier 2009;Zaid 2000;Zaid 2004); and from the late-medieval period in Europe, on which (English-language) accounting history has until now too abundantly focused, untouched as it has regrettably been by the rise of global history. These sources include accounting treatises as well as accounts from different types of agricultural estates.…”

Fair Value vs Conservatism? Aspects of the History of Accounting, Auditing, Business and Finance from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern China

“…2006) purported Marxist restatement of DEB's Sombartian significance, which however appears to be unsupported either by reading Marx (Macve, 1999) or by the archival evidence (Toms, 2010;Fleischman & Macve, 2012 'positive feedback system'. 39 These issues can now perhaps now more fruitfully be redebated in the wider context of parallels and contrasts with the successful development of the economy in late Imperial China and emerging evidence of the limits of the 'duality' that can be found in its bookkeeping and accounting, which tends to reinforce scepticism about the claims for the significance of DEB in the West (Goody, 1996, Chapter 2; Hoskin & Macve, 2012;Yuan et al, 2012;Hoskin et al, 2013).…”