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The purpose of this paper is to contest Edwards et al.’s (2002) findings that resistance to the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping and the form that it took when implemented by the British Government in the mid-nineteenth century was the result of ideological conflict between the privileged landed aristocracy and the rising merchant middle class.

The study draws upon a collection of documents preserved as part of the Grigg Family Papers located in London and the Thomson Papers held in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. It also draws on evidence contained within the British National Archive, the National Maritime Museum and British Parliamentary Papers which has been overlooked by previous studies of the introduction of DEB.

Conflict and delays in the adoption of double-entry bookkeeping were not primarily the product of “ideological” differences between the influential classes. Instead, this study finds that conflict was the result of a complex amalgam of class interests, ideology, personal antipathy, professional intolerance and ambition. Newly discovered evidence recognises the critical, largely forgotten, work of John Deas Thomson in developing a double-entry bookkeeping system for the Royal Navy and the importance of Sir James Graham’s determination that matters of economy would be emphasised in the Navy’s accounting.

This study establishes that crucial to the ultimate implementation of double-entry bookkeeping was the passionate, determined support of influential champions with strong liberal beliefs, most especially John Deas Thomson and Sir James Graham. Prominence was given to economy in government.

Though contemporaries, Adam Smith and Sir James Steuart are commonly portrayed as if they belonged to different eras. Whereas Smith went down in history as both founder of the science of political economy and patron saint of economic liberalism, Steuart became known as the last, outdated advocate for mercantilist policies in Britain. Smith himself was responsible for popularizing the notion of the “system of commerce” as an approach to political economy that dominated the early modern period. As a historiographical concept, the mercantile system became a misguided international trade theory grounded upon the Midas fallacy and the favorable balance of trade doctrine. Smith’s treatment of international trade in the Wealth of Nations, however, was criticized for its inconsistencies and lack of analytical clarity even by some among his own followers. Given Smith’s doubtful credentials as an international trade theorist, the chapter investigates the reasons that led him and Steuart to be placed on opposite sides of the mercantilist divide. The authors analyze the works of both authors in depth, showing that their disagreements had chiefly to do with different views on money and monetary policy. Additionally, the authors explore how early nineteenth-century writers such as Jean-Baptiste Say and J. R. McCulloch helped forge the intellectual profiles of both Steuart and Smith.

This paper suggests that a corporate-environmental food regime is emerging as part of a larger restructuring of capitalism. Like past food regimes, it reflects specific social and political compromises, which I interpret through the social movement concept of interpretive frames. The diasporic-colonial food regime of 1870–1914 grew up in response to working class movements in Europe, and created a historically unprecedent class of commercial family farmers. When world markets collapsed, those farmers entered into new alliances, including one that led to the mercantile-industrial food regime of 1947–1973. Lineaments of a new food regime based on quality audited supply chains seems to be emerging in the space opened by impasse in international negotiations over food standards. Led by food retailers, agrofood corporations are selectively appropriating demands of environmental, food safety, animal welfare, fair trade, and other social movements that arose in the interstices of the second food regime. If it consolidates, the new food regime promises to shift the historical balance between public and private regulation, and to widen the gap between privileged and poor consumers as it deepens commodification and marginalizes existing peasants. Social movements are already regrouping and consolidation of the regime remains uncertain.

Adam Smith recognized that slavery, despite its economic disadvantages, was the rule rather than the exception in the eighteenth-century commercial society. How did he explain the massive employment of enslaved Africans in the American and Caribbean colonies? Several scholars have been highlighting that Smith attributed the persistence of slavery to an almost natural inclination of humanity toward tyranny and dominion. However, the mere reference to the love of domination is not enough to fully answer the question above. This paper addresses another feature of Adam Smith’s account of Atlantic slavery: the relation between the love of domination and the mercantile policies regulating colonial trade. We conclude that Smith saw the extraordinary profitability arising from such policies as an enabling condition to the massive employment of slave labor in the sugar and tobacco colonies.

Marx, like orthodox political economists, developed a concept of historical and economic change that corresponds to the period and mode of thought and policy that is today called “mercantilism”. Marx′s treatment of the subject was varied and uneven and did not achieve a fully developed state until his conception of value and capitalism was well defined and he could apply the notion of mercantilism to his analysis of economic development. In his early writings, Marx addressed mercantilism doctrine while mainly ignoring economic developments taking place in the mercantilist era. In the second period, Marx and Engel′s emphasis was shifted to historical development. It was during the third period when Marx developed his theory of surplus value that his conception of mercantilism became grounded in economic development and attained maturity. Only when Marx′s concept of mercantilism had practical significance could its significance be fully developed.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to look at the adoption of double entry bookkeeping at the Royal Treasury, Portugal, on its establishment in 1761 and the factors contributing to this development. The Royal Treasury was the first central government organization in Portugal to adopt double entry bookkeeping and was a crucial first step in the institutionalisation of the technique in Portuguese public administration.

Set firmly in the archive, this paper adopts new institutional sociology (NIS) to inform the findings of the local, time‐specific accounting policy and practice at the Portuguese Royal Treasury.

Embedded within the broader European context, this study identifies the key pressures exerted upon the Royal Treasury on its formation in 1761, which resulted in major accounting change within Portuguese central government from that date. The study provides further evidence of the importance of the state in the institutionalization of accounting practices by means of coercive pressures and highlights for Portugal the importance of individual actors who, as powerful change agents, made key decisions that influenced accounting change.

This study examines a major instance of accounting change in European central government and broadens the application of NIS in accounting history research to a different country – Portugal – and to a different time – the eighteenth century. It also serves to illuminate the difficulties of collecting pertinent evidence pertaining to this long‐dated time period in identifying certain forms of institutional pressures.

The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fur trade in the United States and Canada that sent hundreds of thousands of furs to Europe and China relied on “Cheap Labor” and the abundance of “Cheap Raw Materials,” that is to say, living beings such as sea otter, land otter, beaver, and seals. Native American labor, procured by and paid through trade goods in a kind of “putting out” piece-rate system, was cheap partially because their lives were maintained/reproduced through traditional agricultural or hunting and gathering economies. The commodification of fur-bearing animals led to their sharp decline and in some cases near extinction. Cheap labor and cheap living beings interacted dynamically in unison to enable capital accumulation under mercantile capitalism. At the very end of the nineteenth century, fur farming as a petty capitalist enterprise became common in Canada and the United States, and more recently has expanded greatly in China.

The central historical question that animates The Familial State – Why the rise and fall of the Dutch Republic? – at first sounds quite particular. Yet the diminutive Netherlands played an enormous historical role in the early modern period (1500–1800), which embraced what we still call the Dutch Golden Age. Its glorious artistic legacy is well known. The Dutch also created the first system of global commercial/colonial power. Dutch developments shaped the histories of other regions, both negatively and positively, in Europe, Africa, the Americas and the colonial territories in the East and West Indies. Furthermore, Dutch history is a window into general processes of European development and mechanisms of politico-economic stability and transformation. But the more we appreciate these facts, the more puzzling aspects of the Netherlands appear. How did its weak state dovetail with unprecedented economic hegemony? Why did not the ruling elite of the Netherlands capitalize on its new resources and reform the state, shoring up the global mercantile system? Why did the Dutch state ultimately decline? My answer to these questions, as well as the comparative optic that they necessitate, is inscribed in the title of the book itself.