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Profession, race and empire: keeping the centre pure, 1921‐1927

Chris Poullaos (Discipline of Accounting, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia)

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal

ISSN: 0951-3574

Article publication date: 27 March 2009

1363

Abstract

Purpose

This paper seeks to examine the social construction of the racialised, colonial subaltern accountant in the British imperial centre in the early twentieth century..

Design/methodology/approach

Primary sources are used to provide an historical analysis of the British accountancy arena in the 1920s, this being the period when “race thinking” first became explicit. Secondary histories of race and empire are used to contextualise this analysis by highlighting: the growth of “race thinking” in the latter part of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries; and the American challenge to British imperial hegemony after the First World War.

Findings

This paper tracks the struggles of British accountants in the imperial centre in the 1920s to find a path between racialist attitudes in the imperial centre, their own included and countervailing discourses of non‐discrimination. For the Scottish chartered bodies, this involved the development of a de facto barrier to entry when a proposed de jure one aroused, surprisingly enough, the prospect of retaliation from American accountants.

Research limitations/implications

Limitations in the primary sources preclude detailed examination of the attitudes of individuals or for all variations in the positions adopted by particular bodies.

Practical implications

The troubling thing about the demise of explicit race talk by the end of the 1920s is that de facto barriers to the entry of the racialised, subordinated Other remained in place.

Originality/value

This paper shows that the rise of race thinking in Britain did not leave British accountancy untouched; largely through the pressure it placed upon the identity of British accountants qua Britons and the consequential issue of inclusion/exclusion of non‐Britons.

Keywords

Citation

Poullaos, C. (2009), "Profession, race and empire: keeping the centre pure, 1921‐1927", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 22 No. 3, pp. 429-468. https://doi.org/10.1108/09513570910945688

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2009, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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