ABSTRACT
In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries the formal organization of accountants from Scotland spread not just to England, Wales and Ireland, but also to the self-governing (white-dominated) dominions of Canada, Australia and South Africa (among others). By 1910 dominion accounting associations, largely modeled on British bodies, had managed to provoke the British chartered accountancy bodies into engaging with them, in part by leveraging the capacity of local legislators to exclude or impose onerous obligations on the members of British bodies undertaking work locally. In their turn, the British bodies turned to the Colonial Offi ce (CO) for assistance, invoking their connexion to British capital and their elite status as expert accountants. An imperial accountancy arena, in which centre and periphery mutually acted upon each other to bring about a degree of co-ordination (if not integration) of professional accountancy across large distances, had emerged (Chua and Poullaos 2002). ‘A web of negotiations, spun around the relays of empire, had been set up and it was not likely to end soon’ (Poullaos 2009b, 259).1
