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The purpose of this paper is to analyze and critique the growing literature on record‐keeping practices in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt with a particular focus on processes of ancient accountability, and provide a research agenda for future work.

Analyzes the contributions of accounting historians in this area as well as the research conducted by Assyriologists and Egyptologists. Our analysis emphasizes the embeddeness of ancient processes of accounting and accountability in their wider contexts.

A framework is proposed comprising levels and spheres of accountability. The levels of accountability consist of: hierarchical; horizontal; and self, all entailing both accounting and non‐accounting elements. Furthermore, accountability is analyzed at three spheres: the individual‐state, the state‐individual, and the individual‐individual.

Further research in this area might examine issues such as the temporal dimension of accountability and whether more precise time measures than those reported in the extant literature were enforced in ancient economies; how the ancients dealt with differences between actual and expected measures; examination on the extent to which accountability exerted an impact on, and the role of accounting in, ordering the lives of individuals and communities; and examination of the trajectories of accounting and accountability across different historical episodes.

Purpose – To provide a general theory for how the ancient Mesoamerican economy functioned.

Design/methods/approach – First the chapter describes formally the sectors or operations of the economy: production, consumption, labor, specialization, exchange and prices, savings and investment, credit, quasi-money, markets, and dynamics. Then it relates this economy to its Mesoamerican cultural context.

Findings – Much but not all of this economy, with its great volume of transactions, worked according to market principles, without coinage or state-fiat money yet not barter. The theory has testable implications. Periods of growth and decline in preindustrial urban societies could have been due to economic forces.

Research limitations/implications – The presentation is verbal, not mathematical. Precolumbian economic documents hardly exist; advances in this line of research will have to come from archaeology (in part informed by earliest contact-era history).

Social implications – Extending theories of money and markets to include preindustrial urban societies should deepen and enrich economic thinking generally.

Originality/value of chapter – The first nonsubstantivist model of the Mesoamerican economy; insights on specialization and competition when firms are households; how high volumes of exchange work with commodity monies.

Purpose – A reevaluation of the theoretical underpinnings that have been used to interpret the prehispanic highland Mesoamerican economy, with a primary focus on the Classic and Postclassic periods in the Valley of Oaxaca.

Approach – Models of prehispanic Mesoamerican economies have long been derived from theoretical constructs broadly associated with Marx's Asiatic mode of production, specifically the writings of Wittfogel and Polanyi, which emphasized centralized control of irrigation and managed systems of production and distribution. Yet, for the Valley of Oaxaca, ethnographic data point to smaller-scale, more flexible systems of production, the importance of market exchange, and mechanisms for domestic cooperation. Drawing on residential excavation data from three Classic-period sites, systematic regional surveys, and other sources, the authors find that the data from the prehispanic era conform much more closely to the ethnographic findings than the long-standing theoretical constructs. New directions for modeling the prehispanic highland Mesoamerican economy are outlined.

Findings – The chapter's empirical focus is on the Classic-period domestic economy in the Valley of Oaxaca, where many households engaged in multicrafting and produced nonsubsistence goods for exchange. The archaeological data do not support the long-held view that most domestic units were self-sufficient.

Originality/value – The chapter draws on and synthesizes the theoretical implications from decades of field research by the authors. The findings provide a basis to question traditional perspectives on prehispanic Mesoamerican economies that have guided research for decades but no longer are supported by empirical findings.

This paper aims to retrace the genesis of private share company in Ancient Rome as one of the greatest innovation in the history of management.

Relying on a thorough and systematic analysis of the available historical material, and modern research, the author reconstructs the first known form of private share company and the way it came into being under late Republic and early Empire.

The scope of commercial partnerships and bounds preventing them from concentration of capitals are shown. The popular myth of private corporations allegedly existing in Ancient Rome is debunked. The author reveals how existing business elements (union of co-owners, the module “slave – peculium – free administration” from individual enterprise, and the principle of inseparability of joint ownership) had been combined to form private share company. Are demonstrated its chief differences from corporation, and the untenability of attempts to deny the real existence of private share companies in Ancient Rome. By way of summing up, the pattern of innovations is brought into relief.

The material opens new vistas for historians and allows them to draw an exacter and more comprehensive picture of Roman private entrepreneurship. Experts in management get an opportunity to retrace the background of modern forms of business organizing. A broader circle of researchers may see what the real path of radical novelties – from the need for them to their implementation – is. And altogether, the author’s conclusions provide scholars with a key to understanding breakthrough phenomena of history.

The results obtained may be used in many courses related to the history of economics, business, management, innovations, etc. Besides, they allow practitioners to discern plainly the origins of new business forms and learn how to make for them or facilitate their growth.

The author's conception of viable novelties sheds light on the processes of social development and modernization. It may serve as an effective instrument in planning reforms and managing them.

The framework of Roman private share company and many allied issues are investigated for the first time. This type of enterprise is presented as a response to the functional request from private entrepreneurs. That is why the new organizational form, despite its radical nature, proved to be quite efficient, and caught on in business. The author infers from his findings a generalized pattern of innovations able to get integrated into reality.

Predicting effects of artificial intelligence on service occupations can be supported by a long historical perspective. Historical databases and archaeology help reconstructing the service sector in ancient societies. Here, the purpose of this paper is to analyse occupational specialization within services in cities of ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, as well as how the service sector is reflected in architectural remains, to identify differences and similarities with today’s Europe.

Occupational titles are traced in epigraphical and literary sources, sorted according to ISCO-08. Secondary sources are used for the architectural evidence of service activities, as well as for the role of contests and entertainment in antiquity.

Compared to current European service employment, professionals were fewer in classical Athens and imperial Rome, which had a greater proportion of specialized salespersons. There were few office buildings and no civic hospitals, but heavy investment in facilities for entertainment and well-being. Quality assessments for goods were little developed; contests for cultural and sports activities assessed entertainment service quality.

This study covers two periods in classical antiquity and is restricted to Mediterranean cultures, although findings may help understanding the service sector in poor countries with informal employment.

While particular services provided in ancient cities have been studied, there has been no broad comparative overview of their service occupations. Services in earlier societies with primitive information and communication technologies can provide clues for current developments.

This paper seeks to give an idea about the role of ethics and values in the Indian economy and business in ancient times and the changed nature of these factors in the contemporary period.

Books and writings from ancient times are used for discussions related to the earlier periods. Studies by the author and other scholars are used to analyze the contemporary situation.

Ethics and values have guided the Indian economy and business since ancient times. With the large‐scale destruction of the native systems in the eighteenth century, and the failure to recognize and revive them after independence, ethics and noble values ceased to guide the economic and business systems. At the local business and society levels, higher human qualities such as help, faith‐based business transactions and basic norms are present even today, especially at the non‐corporate level.

This paper does not discuss different aspects of ethics and values in detail. For contemporary times, it takes up only a few higher human values such as help, faith and broad‐based norms in business promotion and transactions.

It highlights the contribution of higher human values such as help, faith and unwritten norms to the business and economy of contemporary India.

It presents that, even in contemporary times, higher values such as help, goodwill and faith‐based transactions help in the economic and business development of India.

Relationships between long-distance exchange, especially of luxury goods, and the centralization of political power represent a fundamental dimension of political and economic organization. Precolumbian American societies, outside familiar European contexts that have shaped analytical perspectives, provide a broadened comparative field with the potential for more nuanced analysis.

Analysis focuses on four cases that vary in political centralization, institutional complexity, and geographic scale: Ulúa societies without political centralization; small Maya states; Aztec; and Inka empires. Emphasis on relationships between principals and agents highlights the potential of social practices to perform the functions often associated with state institutions

In the Ulúa region, commerce flourished in the absence of states and their concomitants. The very wealth of Ulúa societies and the unusually broad dispersion of prosperity across social segments impeded the development of states by limiting the ability of local lords to intensify their status and convert it to political power. Intensity of market activity and long-distance exchange does not correlate well with the florescence of states. Less centralized and non-centralized political systems may in fact facilitate mercantile activity (or impede it less) in comparison with states.

These cases frame a useful perspective on the organizational configuration of long-distance trade. Informal social mechanisms and practices can be an alternative to state institutions in structuring complex economic relations. The implications for understanding trajectories of societal change are clear: the development of states and centralized political organization is not a prerequisite for robust long-distance commerce.

Sketches the history of economic thought regarding the self‐expanding growth of investments through the accrual of compound interest. Exercises that calculate such growth in terms of “doubling times” have already been found in Babylonian textbooks from c. 2000 BC. Although compound interest was not permitted to be charged in practice (each loan matured at a given date), investors could keep ploughing back their funds into new loans. Through the ages, this essentially logarithmic principle has described how loan capital grows independently of the ability of debtors (or the economy at large) to pay. It has been expressed by dramatists such as Shakespeare, by novelists, and by eighteenth‐century actuaries and economists. Before the contrast between “geometric” and “arithmetic” rates of increase were made famous by Malthus in his description of population growth tendencies, it was formulated with reference to the work on public debt by Richard Price. This principle is incompatible with “equilibrium” theories of self‐regulating debt, or ideas that economies can automatically adjust to its growth over time.

Compares the economic history of china and Europe over the past 2,000 years in an attempt to understand the countries’ present economic positions. Discusses how China’s political and economic system impeded the development of a commodity economy and led to the development of agriculture while Europe’s commodity economy fostered the advancement of science and technology.

The “economics of religion” has grown into a new and groundbreaking approach to the study of religious beliefs, preferences, attitudes, belongings, organizations, and dynamics. This chapter circumscribes its epistemological area, outlines some of the major developments in the field, allows place for the presentation of both important theoretical models (market theory, rational choice, supply-and-demand) and crucial criticisms that have been directed toward them. If the “economics of religion” partakes of an attempt to explain religion in ancient or recent history, in the conceptual prism of economics, the general movement known as globalization has accelerated the convergence of economics and cultural/social analysis in religious studies. Anthropology, however, has gone its own way regarding economic issues. It has been somewhat reluctant to espouse the principles of “economics of religion,” even while being convinced of its relevance. Some recent anthropological works on globalization and religion are presented here as examples of this ambivalent contribution of anthropology to the economics of religion in global settings.