ABSTRACT
This essay is divided into three sections. The first section describes briefly some examples of accounting records within our period which were not kept on a double-entry basis. This serves to illustrate the diversity of types of business records without purporting to provide a comprehensive inventory of them. The second, and largest, section describes major features of double-entry bookkeeping in (roughly) the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The description is based on two classes of material: first, some of the numerous treatises or textbooks on accounting or bookkeeping published during the period; and second, some surviving account-books. As to the latter, account-books of nine prominent business men have been examined in detail—Sir Thomas Gresham, Sir William Calley, Sir John Banks, Sir Robert Clayton, Sir Dudley North, Sir Charles Peers, Richard Du Cane, Peter Du Cane and William Braund; and also those of an obscure seventeenth-century merchant, William Hoskins. 2 Account-books of some early companies have also been examined. The third and final section of the essay attempts to explain, by historical reconstruction, the changes in accounting practice concerning the calculation of profits which appear to have occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when accounting for joint stock companies came to play a dominant part in the determination of accounting “principles” and conventions.
