Accounting for the American War of Independence 1776–1781

Celebrations of the bicentennial of the declaration of Independence by the American Colonies haue recently been completed. A contemporary view of some of the accounting problems associated with the ensuing war is given in the seventh and eighth Reports of the ‘Commissioners appointed to examine, take, and state, the Public Accounts of the Kingdom’. Both reports mere presented to the House of Commons in 1782 and published amongst the State Papers included in the Annual Register for the year 1790. ¹ The reports reveal a surprisingly modern approach to some problems of accounting, auditing and government contracting which remain with us today, and they also emphasise the extraordinary difficulties of efficiently administering the finance of a distant war mithin the confines of eighteenth century accounting practices.