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This historical study explores accounting’s association with processes of cultural hybridisation involving themes such as image-(un)making, alliance-formation and norm-setting as part of Britain’s civilising mission during the era of modern globalisation. In doing so, the purpose of this paper is to examine the manner in which accounting may be implicated in micro-practices through which multi-layered socio-political relations of inequality are produced.

Archival materials enable an accounting understanding of the historical processes of image-(un)making, norm-setting and formation of a hybrid form of rule through elite indigenous alliances.

The study finds that the British Empire’s colonial project on civilising the indigenous peoples in British Fiji involved: the (un)making of indigenous identities and their moralities; and the elaboration of difference through ambiguous, partial and contradictory application of accounting in attempts to support the globalised civilising course. The globalising challenges indigenous peoples faced included accounting training to change habits in order to gain integration into the global imperial order. The study also finds that the colonised indigenous Fijians had emancipatory capacities in their negotiation of and resistance to accounting.

The paper identifies avenues for further accounting examination of such processes in the context of post-colonialism and current forms of neo-liberal globalisation.

By investigating accounting’s association with processes of cultural hybridisation, this paper makes a significant contribution by providing the detail on the role of accounting records kept by the British Empire to facilitate Britain’s domination and control over the colony of Fiji and its residents.

There are a number of reasons for thinking that the pursuit of change through revolution is fundamentally flawed. Indeed, after over two centuries of debate, Burkean conservatives seem to have won the argument. They have made a strong case against revolutionary change by demonstrating how it has regularly produced some of the worst atrocities we have known. They point out that despite the fact that revolutionary movements have often been the repositories of some of our highest aspirations, their unintended consequences have produced enormous human suffering. And they show how the pursuit of gradual change in some countries brought about the very same goals to which revolutionaries aspired in others, but with far less bloodshed and suffering.

But are the conservatives right? In this article, I consider various problems with their argument. One of the biggest is that the gradual changes they admire were closely entwined with the revolutions they deplore. Not only did revolutions provide incrementalists with a kind of compass that set the direction of change, but they also induced fear in powerful elites: fear that gave these elites an incentive to accept incremental changes they would otherwise have resisted. Indeed, because of these kinds of effects, countries that are usually seen as paradigm examples of the virtues of conservative change may have ultimately been among the major beneficiaries of revolution. In short, there is a good case for arguing that modern conservatism has been free riding on revolution.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the work of Carnegie and Walker and report the results of Part 2 of their study on household accounting in Australia during the period from the 1820s to the 1960s.

The study adopts a microhistorical approach involving a detailed examination of actual accounting practices in the Australian home based on 18 sets of surviving household records identified as exemplars and supplemented by other sources which permit their contextualisation and interpretation.

The findings point to considerable variety in the accounting practices pursued by individuals and families. Household accounting in Australia was undertaken by both women and men of the middle and landed classes whose surviving household accounts were generally found to comprise one element of diverse and comprehensive personal record keeping systems. The findings indicate points of convergence and divergence in relation to the contemporary prescriptive literature and practice.

The paper reflects on the implications of the findings for the notion of the household as a unit of consumption as opposed to production, gender differences in accounting practice and financial responsibility, the relationship between changes in the life course and the commencement and cessation of household accounting, and the relationship between domestic accounting practice and social class.

In the periods, following the First and Second World Wars, colonial states across the British empire underwent waves of reforms that were geared toward improving human well-being, from enhancing social conditions, such as health and education, to expanding opportunities for economic and political engagement. The literature on the colonial state typically traces these state-building efforts to the agency of European colonial officials. However, evidence from a historical analysis of Trinidad and Tobago reveals a different agent driving state reform: the colonized. A local labor movement during colonialism forced the colonial state to construct a number of state agencies to ameliorate the economic, political, and social conditions in the colony, thereby resulting in an increase in state capacity. This study, therefore, provides critical intervention into the colonial state literature by showing that the agency of the colonized, as opposed to just the colonizers, is key to state-building, and specifying the mechanisms by which the subaltern constrained colonial officials and forced them to enact policies that improved colonial state capacity.

Despite the importance of the first Chinese language movement in the early 1970s that elevated the status of Chinese as an official language in British Hong Kong, the movement and the colonial state’s response remained under-explored. Drawing insights primarily from Bourdieu and Phillipson, this study aims to revisit the rationale and process of the colonial state’s incorporation of the Chinese language amid the 1970s.

This is a historical case study based on published news and declassified governmental documents.

The central tenet is that the colonial state’s cultural incorporation was the tactics that aimed to undermine the nationalistic appeal in Hong Kong society meanwhile contain the Chinese language movement from turning into political unrest. Incorporating the Chinese language into the official language regime, however, did not alter the pro-English linguistic hierarchy. Symbolic domination still prevailed as English was still considered as the more economically rewarding language comparing with Chinese, yet official recognition of Chinese language created a common linguistic ground amongst the Hong Kong Chinese and fostered a sense of local identity that based upon the use of the mother tongue, Cantonese. From the case of Hong Kong, it suggests that Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of state formation paid insufficient attention to the international context and the non-symbolic process of state-making itself could also shape the degree of the state’s symbolic power.

Extant studies on the Chinese language movement are overwhelmingly movement centred, this paper instead brings the colonial state back in so to re-examine the role of the state in the incorporative process of the Chinese language in Hong Kong.

The involvement of accounting in imperial expansion in the South Pacific during the mid‐nineteenth to the mid‐twentieth century is critically analysed. Through a study of archival data, it examines the way in which the practice of accounting became involved in the production of a calculative knowledge of imperialism. In particular, it explores: (a) the processes through which an indigenous Fijian élitist structure was transformed into a British instrument of domination and control; (b) the way in which accounting calculations and explanations were imposed upon the indigenous chiefs; and (c) the way in which accounting, once imposed, was used as an integral part of imperial policies and activities for Empire expansion. The study highlights that before annexation what was previously seen to be just a question of an “American debt” came to be seen as requiring formal imperial intervention. During formal imperial rule, however, British reaction to indigenous resistance to accounting‐based administration was managed through a bargaining policy. This change enabled high chiefs to enjoy a “special immunity” through accounting’s negotiable interpretations, interrelationships and explanations. Accounting as a financial and an administrative system of accountability thus became an integral part of a British‐imposed collaborative system of imperialism.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the education of children at St Helena Penal Establishment in Queensland and the trials faced by the educators that delivered their formal schooling. The paper will add to the growing research into the prison island and will provide an insight into a unique facet of education in the newly established Australian State of Queensland.

The historical analysis draws on original documents and published works to chronicle the provision of education to the children of warders at the St Helena Penal Establishment.

The establishment of the Department of Public Instruction and the introduction of the State Education Act of 1875 were intended to provide Queensland children from 6 to 12 years of age with free, compulsory, and secular primary education. The full implementation of the Act took until 1900, and in the process, initiatives like St Helena State School No. 12, through issues of administrative control, saw teachers excluded from the Department of Public Instruction in order to include schoolchildren under the auspices of the same department.

The research paper is an initial investigation into the subject and limited by the paucity of primary data available on the topic.

The case study adds to the growing literature on other aspects of the prison at St Helena, Queensland and adds to knowledge of life on the island. Furthermore, the aspects of control over staff on the island and the requirement for the teachers to double as guards, ready to take up arms in defence of the prison, provides new insights into the obligations placed on some early educators.

A royal charter of incorporation imposing public benefit/social responsibilities established the privately owned British South Africa Company (BSAC), in return for power to exploit a huge territory using low-cost local labour. This study explores the dual principal–agent problem of how the BSAC used annual report narratives to report on its conflicting economic responsibilities to investors versus its public benefit charter responsibilities to the British Crown.

Having digitised the dataset, the research analyses narratives from 29 BSAC annual reports spanning a continuous 35-year royal charter period, using computer-aided keyword content analysis to identify economic-orientated versus public benefit-orientated annual report narratives. The research analyses how the annual report narratives shifted according to four key contextual periods by reference to the changing influence of private investors versus the British Crown.

There are two key findings. First, economic primacy. At no point do public benefit disclosures outweigh economic disclosures. Second, the BSAC's meso-corporate context and macro-social/political context can explain patterns in public benefit disclosures. The motivation for producing public benefit information is not altruism. Rather, commercial interests motivate disclosure. The BSAC used its annual reports to sustain what proved ultimately unsustainable – royal charter-style colonialism.

This accounting history study contributes to an understanding of corporate narrative reporting using one of the earliest known cases of such analysis and shows how accounting plays a central role in facilitating a company in sustaining its interests. This 100-year lookback may be a portend of the future for modern-day annual report corporate social responsibility narratives in, say, mining and oil and gas company corporate reports, especially if these natural resources run out.

This paper aims to uncover the trajectory of the anti-corruption effort of the Hong Kong colonial Government by identifying its general approach of denial in the pre-War years. It highlights the path-dependence nature, as well as the path-creation logic of the policy process of anti-corruption reform and the anxiety of the colonial administration in maintaining trust of the local population in the post-War years. These insights should enhance the general understanding of the nature of colonial governance.

This paper is primarily based on archival materials available at the British National Archives and Hong Kong Public Records Office.

The paper intends to go before the “Great Man narrative” in explaining the success of the anti-corruption effort in colonial Hong Kong. Whilst the colonial government was fully aware of the endemic of corruption and the substantial involvement of European officers, she was still cocooned with the misguided belief that the core of the administration was mostly “incorruptible”. The Air Raid Precaution Department scandal in 1941 was, however, a powerful wake-up that rendered the denial and self-illusion no longer defensible. The policy ideas of the 1940s did shape the Prevention of Corruption Ordinance 1948 and other related reforms, yet they were not immediately translated into fundamental changes in the institutional set-up of the anti-graft campaign. The limitations of these half-hearted measures were fully exposed in the coming decades. The cumulative effects of the piecemeal anti-graft efforts of the colonial government over the first century of rule, however, did path the way for the “revolutionary” changes in the 1970s under Murray MacLehose.

This is a highly original piece based on under-explored archival materials. The findings should have a major contribution to the scholarship on the nature of colonial governance and the history of anti-corruption efforts of Hong Kong.

The purpose of this paper is to complement and extend accounting studies on gender and post-colonialism by examining the interrelationship between accounting, gender and sexuality within an imperial context.

Archival materials enable the construction of an accounting knowledge of how ideas of masculinity and sexuality shaped both female and male participation in distant British colonies.

By exploring the manner in which accounting may be implicated in micro-practices through which gendered/sexualized relations are produced in societies the paper finds that empire’s colonial project on Indian indentured workers, the constitution of their identities, and the translation of abstract policies into practice were facilitated by accounting instruments for management and control.

Original research based on archival studies of British colonial documents.