Research directions in accounting history: Reflections and prospects

ABSTRACT

This article revisits the author’s “Research directions in accounting history” (1989), an early contribution to the historiographical study of accounting. That article identified three key approaches to accounting history: “understanding the past,” “contextualizing accounting,” and “the new positivism,” and anticipated to some degree the intellectual conflict between so-called traditional accounting history and new accounting history, which arose in the 1990s and persists to some extent. This conflict often stressed different views of the role of theory in historical accounting research, different notions of sources and methods, and even different views about the limits and boundaries of accounting itself. Accounting historians still have significant scope for innovation, and many gaps remain to be researched. Some dimensions that historical accounting researchers can consider are periods, places, people, practices, propagation, products, and professions, where newer researchers can collaborate fruitfully with more established accounting historians to expand our knowledge of accounting’s past.

Keywords:
accounting history; contexts; levels of theory; sources and methods; international collaboration

RESUMO

O presente artigo revisita o texto do autor, “Research directions in accounting history” (“Direções de pesquisa na história da contabilidade”, em tradução livre) (Napier, 1989), uma das primeiras contribuições para o estudo historiográfico da contabilidade. Nele, são identificadas três abordagens principais para a história da contabilidade: "compreender o passado", "contextualizar a contabilidade" e "o novo positivismo". Além disso, antecipa-se, em certa medida, o conflito intelectual entre a história da contabilidade tradicional e a nova história da contabilidade, surgida na década de 1990 e que persiste até hoje. Esse conflito frequentemente enfatizava diferentes visões sobre o papel da teoria na pesquisa histórica da contabilidade, diferentes noções de fontes e métodos, e até mesmo diferentes visões sobre os limites e as fronteiras da própria contabilidade. Os historiadores da contabilidade ainda têm um amplo espaço para inovar, e muitas lacunas permanecem a serem preenchidas. Períodos, lugares, pessoas, práticas, propagação, produtos e profissões são algumas das dimensões que os pesquisadores da história da contabilidade podem considerar. Os pesquisadores mais novos podem colaborar de forma frutífera com os historiadores mais experientes para ampliarmos nosso conhecimento sobre o passado da contabilidade.

Palavras-chave:
história da contabilidade; contextos; níveis de teoria; fontes e métodos; colaboração internacional

1. INTRODUCTION

In 1989, the British Accounting Review published my article “Research directions in accounting history” (Napier, 1989) (this article is referred to as “research directions” in what follows). This article examined changing research approaches that were emerging in the 1980s, as researchers increasingly responded to Anthony Hopwood’s call to try to “study accounting in the contexts in which it operates” (Hopwood, 1983, p. 287). The article originated in a presentation that I was invited to give at Portsmouth Polytechnic (now the University of Portsmouth) in 1987. I had been a member of the accounting faculty at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) since 1979, but my interest in the history of accounting had been stimulated several years before this, when I was undertaking my professional accountancy training. I came across the book Studies in the history of accounting (Littleton & Yamey, 1956) and found the varied narratives of accounting’s past to be fascinating. I was able to study the history of accounting with Basil Yamey himself at LSE, and when Yamey retired, I took over his accounting history teaching.

Yamey’s accounting history course focused, unsurprisingly, on Yamey’s own research interests in the field (for discussions of these, see Macve [2021], Napier [2021], and Sangster [2021]). These emphasized the emergence and development of double-entry bookkeeping, early writings about bookkeeping and accounting, and the contribution, if any, of double entry to the development of capitalism. Yamey was an economist with conventional views about economic rationality, and he concluded that, despite arguments to the contrary, double-entry did not play a central role in the coming of modern capitalism (see, for example, Yamey [1949, 1964]). In Yamey’s view, double-entry bookkeeping provided information about the past that was largely irrelevant to a capitalist’s need to forecast the future: “Accounting served limited objectives and, in particular, the striking of balances was performed primarily for narrow bookkeeping purposes” (Yamey, 1949, p. 113).

However, teaching and research in accounting at LSE were about to go through a dramatic change, with the appointment in 1985 of Anthony Hopwood as Ernst & Young Professor of International Accounting and Financial Management. Hopwood had founded the journal Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS) in 1976 (Hopwood, 1988). One of the first conversations I had with Hopwood related to a recent article, by Roger Lister (1983) that aimed to present the study of accounting history as an “illegitimate” scholarly activity. Hopwood was working on a rebuttal of this article with the U.S. accounting historian H. T. Johnson (to be published as Hopwood and Johnson [1986]) and asked for my comments. Hopwood had already published several historical articles in AOS, including Johnson’s own study on U.S. management accounting systems (Johnson, 1983). Johnson used an economic analysis drawing on transaction cost theory in his examination of costing and management accounting in increasingly complex business organizations. However, Hopwood also published historical studies that adopted different theoretical perspectives.

By the time I was invited to present the first version of “Research directions,” I was aware that historical accounting research was moving away from a more traditional interest in the emergence and development of accounting methods and was beginning to study how accounting was used within organizations and more broadly within society. I wanted to document this movement and to flag up some possible future ways in which historical accounting research could develop.

In the next section, I reflect, with the benefit of nearly 40 years’ hindsight, on my discussion of accounting history in “Research directions.” Following this, I sketch out some of the important later contributions to accounting historiography, and in the final section, I mention continued gaps in our historical knowledge of accounting.

2. THE ORIGINAL “RESEARCH DIRECTIONS”

To provide some structure to my discussion in “Research directions,” I identified three “key approaches, which are interrelated but are not intended to be exhaustive” (Napier, 1989, p. 239). This qualification is important because there is a danger of seeing such a categorization as a rigid taxonomy. It should be noted that there are three approaches, whereas much subsequent debate in accounting historiography identified two approaches, identified as “traditional accounting history” (TAH) and “new accounting history” (NAH), and tried to map TAH onto my first approach (“understanding the past”) and NAH onto my second approach (“contextualizing accounting”). The third approach that I suggested (“the new positivism”) has largely been overlooked in subsequent literature (see, for example, Carnegie [2014], for a review of accounting historiography from 1983 to 2012, and Napier [2020], for more recent developments).

2.1 Understanding the Past

This approach was motivated by the important report of the American Accounting Association’s Committee on Accounting History (1970), which justified the study of accounting history on “intellectual” and “utilitarian” grounds. An understanding of how accounting has changed in the past, and the various factors that assist or hinder such changes, helps accountants to be more aware of the likelihood of possible future changes in accounting ideas and practices. Also, knowledge of accounting in the past could help in providing answers to challenges of the present, or in showing that proposed solutions were unlikely to succeed because they had been tried and failed before.

This section of “Research directions” emphasized the importance of going to sources for knowledge of past accounting. This did not mean that the accounting historian simply collected and summarized old accounting documents. Historical specificity was seen as being in tension with demands to generalize. Yamey (1981) had warned about the dangers of premature generalization, when a small number of cases might be used to justify sweeping claims about accounting practice in the past. However, understanding the past is not just a matter of transcribing and reporting past accounting records: some degree of interpretation is required to “make sense” of the archival evidence. Interpretations do not all have the same value: “It is the sign of a good historian … that the explanations and interpretations that he or she offers have a degree of coherence - they tell a good story” (Napier, 1989, p. 241).

I was later to explain what I meant by “telling a good story.” A story could be “good” in several senses: “because it is true to the sources, because it is elegantly written, or because it inculcates desirable beliefs and practices” (Napier, 2017, p. 46). This emphasizes historical accounting research writing as a form of narrative, with strong attention given to the behavior of individuals, seen as having personal agency. The focus on people, as preparers, users, and subjects of accounts, encourages biographical research in accounting (an early call for biographical research came from Cowton [1985]). Such research includes collective biographies of specific groups, such as the first members of a professional accountancy body (for example, Carnegie et al. [2003] studied the common features of the earliest members of an Australian professional organization). This approach is referred to as “prosopography.” A focus on specific individuals, organizations, or events can also be classified as “microhistory” (Carnegie & McBride, 2023).

The examples of historical accounting research that I discussed in the “Understanding the past” section of “Research directions” were generally embedded in archival evidence, broadly defined. However, even in this section, I was aware of developments in historical accounting research during the 1980s, when I noted that “examination of original accounting documents is crucial in giving our theories and generalizations some empirical content” (Napier, 1989, p. 240). Most early accounting historians, at least those writing in English, did not make a parade of any theoretical predispositions in their work. They generally adopted conventional economic viewpoints to help them understand how individuals and organizations acted. This silence as regards theoretical commitments led Hopwood (1983, p. 289) to suggest that “until recently, both historical and comparative analyses of the accounting phenomenon have adopted a most atheoretical stance.” Hopwood’s remark hints that things were beginning to change, and in “Research directions,” I addressed this under the heading “Contextualizing accounting.”

2.2 Contextualizing Accounting

Looking back, the section on historical accounting research that aimed to study accounting in its contexts understates the wide variety of work that was emerging in the 1980s by emphasizing the importance of Michel Foucault (Napier, 1989, p. 245). This focus rather downplayed the contributions of Tony Tinker and his collaborators, who had written some of the earliest articles in what was later to be named the NAH stream of research (Bertalan & Napier, 2016). Tinker (1980) had, as early as 1980, contributed to AOS an article that used ideas from political economy to examine the accounts of an iron-ore extractor in Sierra Leone over 46 years. Later, Neimark and Tinker (1986, p. 375) were to criticize previous research in the field of accounting and managerial control for an “absence of a socio-historical perspective.”

One aspect of Foucault’s work that was emphasized in this section of “Research directions” was power-knowledge relationships, with the example of Hopwood’s discussion of the 18th-century English potter Josiah Wedgwood’s attempts to develop practical measures of the cost of his products (Hopwood, 1987). But perhaps more weight was given to Foucault’s methodological contributions of “genealogy” and “archaeology.” Genealogy was seen as a way of studying accounting in its contexts, “such as particular national conditions, political objectives of states, the development of related disciplines, and historical chance” (Napier, 1989, p. 246). Archaeology tries to identify the “conditions of possibility” of practices and discourses, so again is likely to try to locate accounting in broader contexts.

Rather prudently, I ended the “Contextualizing accounting” section by suggesting: “Whether or not the Foucauldian programme will ultimately be successful in expanding our understanding of accounting history remains to be seen” (Napier, 1989, p. 246). I suggested that the approach would be useful in studying managerial accounting and in examining the development of accounting as a profession. Finally, I warned that “some accounting academics find [a Foucauldian] approach to be obscure if not obscurantist” (Napier, 1989, p. 247). As an alternative, I suggested a third way for accounting history research, “the new positivism.”

2.3 The New Positivism

This approach drew on two trends developing in the 1970s and 1980s. First was the emergence of positive accounting theory (PAT), associated with Ross Watts and Jerold Zimmerman (1986). This approach emphasized the use of sophisticated statistical analysis to examine large sets of data, within an explicit neoclassical economics framework, and was committed to a hypothetico-deductive research methodology. Although such an approach had emerged as market-based accounting research (MBAR) in the 1960s, Watts and Zimmerman argued that MBAR was finance research rather than accounting research, because it used accounting numbers, such as corporate income and asset measures, to explain (in a statistical sense) security price phenomena. They argued that, in accounting research, we should be aiming to explain accounting phenomena, such as accounting numbers and accounting policy choices, by reference to non-accounting variables.

The second trend was “cliometrics,” also known as “econometric history” (McCloskey, 1987). This also involved a hypothetico-deductive approach to the testing of hypotheses drawn from applying neoclassical economic theory to historical data sets, often using “counterfactual” approaches to investigate the importance, or otherwise, of external contingencies on historical developments. There are interesting resonances between the identification of “conditions of possibility” implied by Foucault’s archaeology and the positing of counterfactuals, arguing that, if certain conditions were absent, then events would have developed differently.

Although I wanted to encourage more historical accounting research that aimed to analyze large sets of data systematically, I was aware that severe barriers were inhibiting such research. One obvious problem was the scarcity of relevant data sets, which meant that researchers would need, in many cases, to “hand collect” data. Second, even if data were available, they might be inaccurate or misleading, and researchers would face quandaries about how far they could take historical data at face value. One early study that I identified as an example of the application of PAT to accounting history was the investigation by Chee Chow (1983) of how stock market regulation in the United States of America in the 1930s affected the wealth of security holders. However, this study was criticized by Merino et al. (1987) as both “ahistorical” and “asocial,” suggesting that the challenges to a positive accounting history are conceptual as well as practical.

3. REFLECTIONS ON ACCOUNTING HISTORY’S DIRECTIONS

3.1 The Coming of the NAH

My “Research directions” article was not the only contribution to accounting historiography at the end of the 1980s. Two linked papers in the leading Australian accounting journal Abacus (Previts et al., 1990 a , 1990b), which were aimed mainly at more traditional accounting historians, attempted to encourage historical accounting research in broader areas, periods, and locations, and discussed how social science research methods could be reconciled with those more associated with traditional history. However, the growing attraction of historical accounting research to many of those forming the early generation of what Jane Broadbent and Richard Laughlin (2013) have called the “interdisciplinary and critical research project” meant that historical research studies that drew on wider theories than the hitherto prevalent neoclassical economics were increasingly appearing in accounting.

An important forum for such studies was the triennial Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting (IPA) Conference, launched in 1985. Researchers presenting papers at the IPA Conference often submitted them to AOS to be considered for publication, and AOS had by 1990 published around 20 historical articles that could be classified as coming within what I had called “contextualizing accounting” (Bertalan & Napier, 2016). In 1990, AOS collaborated with the Academy of Accounting Historians, the U.S. organization set up to support historical accounting research, in a conference at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. Anthony Hopwood invited me to collaborate with Peter Miller, a significant contributor to Foucauldian-influenced accounting history studies, on the introductory presentation at the conference, which we called “How and why should we do the history of accounting?” This conference epitomized the growing tensions between different groups of accounting historians, but the groups needed names.

Several of the papers presented at the 1988 IPA Conference that came within the accounting history field were about to be published in AOS. As editor of the journal, Hopwood decided that the history articles would have more impact if they were brought together and published in a “special issue.” The organizers of the 1988 IPA Conference, Miller et al. (1991) , were asked to write an introduction to the issue, and this was entitled “The new accounting history: an introduction”; apparently, Hopwood had suggested the title, although, as Bertalan and Napier (2016) have noted, this was not the first use of the term “new accounting history” in the literature. The name “traditional accounting history” appears to have been introduced later by Ross Stewart (1992) .

3.2 Methodological Contributions

The Miller et al. (1991) introduction was very insistent about what NAH was “not,” but it suggested that historical accounting studies could draw on a wide range of theoretical analyses. Indeed, it was feared by some more traditional accounting historians that theory development was pushing out the use of archival evidence in historical accounting research (Fleischman & Tyson, 1997). Perhaps this fear was exacerbated by the introduction to the next “special issue” of AOS on accounting history, “Genealogies of calculation” (Miller & Napier, 1993). This had been developed from our paper at the Denton conference in 1990 and, as well as providing a critique of more TAH research, also advocated the use of Foucauldian research approaches such as genealogy (although Foucault was not directly cited in this article). Based on Google Scholar citations, this article has been one of the most influential contributions to accounting history methodology.

I was fortunate to be invited by Lee Parker, one of the joint founding editors of Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ), to collaborate with Garry Carnegie on editing a proposed special issue of AAAJ devoted to historical accounting research. This was published in 1996 and, as well as a brief editorial introduction, we provided an agenda-setting article, “Critical and interpretive histories: Insights into accounting’s present and future through its past” (Carnegie & Napier, 1996). One purpose of this article was to encourage a “rapprochement” between NAH and TAH. We argued that historical accounting research needed to be “grounded firmly in the archive while being elucidated by theoretical perspectives” (Carnegie & Napier, 1996, p. 31). We also identified eight areas or approaches that we considered would be fruitful for accounting history research:

1. Studies of surviving business records of firms.

2. Using accounting records in business history.

3. Biography.

4. Prosopography.

5. Institutional history.

6. Public sector accounting.

7. Comparative international accounting history.

8. Innovative research methods (specifically oral history).

This list was not intended to provide a taxonomy of potential accounting history research, but rather an agenda for potentially interesting and exciting work. It is gratifying to note that there has been substantial subsequent research in all eight areas, but accounting history has not been limited to these approaches.

Since the “Research directions” article, “Genealogies of calculation,” and “Critical and interpretive histories,” I have made several other contributions to historiographical writings in accounting history. Indeed, in his review of accounting historiography from 1983 to 2012, Carnegie (2014) identifies me as contributing to 11 of the 62 items he reviews. More recently, I have been concerned with the potential roles of theory in historical accounting research, and this is the topic of the next subsection.

3.3 Theory in Accounting History

In an article reviewing and analyzing the historical accounting research articles published in the first 30 years of AOS, I noted that “accounting researchers are not normally trained as historians” (Napier, 2006, p. 455) and that “those of us brought up in a social science tradition often feel uneasy at research that explicitly denies its generalizability” (Napier, 2006, p. 467). As Michael Doron (2025, p. 393) has observed, in a critique of the use of theory in historical accounting research, “Social science is essentially deductive, that is, beginning from generalisable theories and then trying to prove them (or expecting others, e.g., historians, to prove them).” On the other hand, traditional historical research normally starts from a specific question that is researched by reference to an identifiable set of evidence (usually but not necessarily documentary in form), with no expectation that the historian will aim to explain the events being examined by applying more general ideas, principles or even “laws of history.” This can create practical problems for academics wishing to publish historical work in prestigious generalist accounting journals, where editors often seem to prefer work that claims to contribute towards extending and developing theoretical ideas to more narrative approaches to history (Doron, 2025, p. 397).

In practice, the word “theory” can often be misunderstood, and recently, in collaboration with other accounting historians, I have tried to develop a clearer idea of how theory, in its broad sense, can help accounting historians to plan their work and get the most out of their source data. One aspect of this was to examine how, in practice, accounting historians used different types of theory to try to understand how organizations work (Carnegie et al., 2020). In this study, we used Sue Llewellyn’s “levels of theory” model (Llewellyn, 2003) as a framework for classifying the use of theory by historical accounting researchers looking at the use of accounting for organizational control. This model identifies five “levels,” ranging from “theory as metaphor,” where the researcher in effect “names” phenomena in a way intended to be illuminating, to “grand theory,” where theory operates at an overarching level and claims to explain every conceivable phenomenon. We found that, in practice, use of “grand theory” was rare, a conclusion backed up by Ferri et al. (2021), using a wider database. Likely, mainstream historians’ suspicions of theory in the context of historical research stem from an unconscious view that “all” theory is “grand theory.”

In a recent agenda-setting article (Cordery et al., 2023), my coauthors and I aimed to guide how accounting historians could use theory in their work. As well as summarizing the Llewellyn “levels of theory” framework, we also discussed a framework developed with organizational history in mind by Maclean et al. (2016). We concluded:

Theory is valuable to the extent that it illuminates and problematic to the extent that it obfuscates, and a simple theoretical framework that the researcher can develop as a product of the historical study will often produce more innovative research than putting the archival material through the mangle of a complex and entangled theory, no matter how popular that theory may be (Cordery et al., 2023, p. 375)

My most extensive consideration of the roles of theory was “How theorising can enhance historical accounting research” (Napier, 2022), in which I provided guidance not only for accounting historians but also for qualitative researchers more generally. After reviewing various frameworks for theorization developed in different social science-oriented contexts, I concluded (Napier, 2022, p. 148) with a five-step programme for the profitable use of theory in historical accounting research:

1. Providing an initial framework for stimulating research ideas and helping in research design.

2. Identifying potentially important variables, factors, and relationships that can be searched for within the archival or other evidential material.

3. Suggesting existing concepts that can help in identifying evidence (both already existing and generated in the research process) that may be important for the story that the researcher wishes to tell.

4. Allowing for creativity in developing new concepts as well as refining existing ones.

5. Ensuring a coherent narrative that is representationally true and sensitive to context.

I believe that even historians suspicious of “theory” will be able to see the value of these objectives.

3.4 Method in Accounting History

My earliest forays into historical accounting research would by today’s standards be regarded as “atheoretical,” but they were stimulated by debates in the historical accounting literature that, in my view, could be explored using archival evidence. One of these debates related to fixed asset depreciation in the nineteenth century. In his paper “Nineteenth century accounting error,” Richard Brief (1965) suggested that companies in the nineteenth century did not have systematic depreciation practices, but I was not convinced that this was actually the case. I explored the archives of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O), a large UK shipping company, from 1840 to 1914, and found that the company’s depreciation practices, while originally unsystematic, gradually became more formalized by the latter part of the nineteenth century (Napier, 1990).

The other debate related to the use by companies, particularly those in the shipping industry, of “secret reserves” (amounts controlled by a company’s directors that are concealed on the company’s balance sheet by undervaluing assets or overstating liabilities). The classic UK case of the use of secret reserves to conceal the financial position of a company involved the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, which collapsed in 1930 (Green, 1982). I wanted to explore whether the Royal Mail Company was a “one-off,” and I examined P&O’s archives for the period 1914-1936. I found that the Royal Mail Company’s use of secret reserves was, if anything, modest in comparison with that of P&O, which had, unknown to investors and customers, come within days of going bankrupt in 1932 (Napier, 1991).

For both these articles, my research method was to identify potentially useful records from the archive’s catalogue, read and manually transcribe what I considered to be relevant archival material, and then marshal the archival evidence in the form of a systematic narrative. This was well before the availability of digital cameras that could be used to take images of documents in the archive for later perusal, and at the beginning of the 1990s, software packages for the analysis of qualitative data were only just beginning to emerge (Richards, 2002). Historical accounting researchers now have a broader set of resources for their work, with the growth of digitization of archives providing new opportunities (Cordery et al. [2023]; see also Sangster [2025]). However, the associated process of digitalization, where individuals and organizations operate as far as they can through computer-based systems, creates challenges for accounting historians researching more recent times, as computer-based records may be practically impossible for an external researcher to access.

Cordery et al. (2023) consider a range of innovative research methods for accounting historians, some of which are already being used fruitfully. The availability of bibliometric analysis packages has allowed researchers to examine, in a systematic way, bodies of literature in accounting history. As well as the study of the use of theory by Ferri et al. (2021) already mentioned, an excellent example of a software-based bibliometric analysis is the examination by Bigoni et al. (2024) of the influence of Michel Foucault in accounting history. They identified 117 accounting history articles that had used Foucault’s ideas to provide a theoretical framework, observing seven “key Foucauldian themes.” In principle, this type of research could have been undertaken manually, but this would have involved considerable effort and a greater danger of omissions and misclassifications. Often, digitizing a set of accounting records can be a complex and time-consuming process, but the end product allows for novel analyses and may identify potentially interesting issues that might have been missed in manual research. As Kuter et al. (2025) point out: “By adopting the digital approach, we could do everything wherever we wished, so saving both time and the expenses of travelling to-and-from the archive.”

Despite these methodological innovations, more traditional historical methods will likely continue to be employed by accounting historians. One feature of recent publications is the inclusion of a formal “sources and methods” section in many articles, which provides readers with information that helps them to assess the reliability and validity of the author’s narrative and more conceptual conclusions. Experienced accounting researchers, with a deep understanding of the context within which their evidence has been created and preserved, are still likely to find some form of “close reading” (Ohrvik, 2024) of the sources to be an effective and fruitful research strategy. For newer researchers, however, the greater structure and formality of assistive software packages may provide them with more confidence in their narratives and conclusions.

4. GAPS AND PROSPECTS

Since I began my interest in accounting history, the field has grown dramatically, with dedicated academic journals and regular national and international conferences, seminars, and workshops. Recent bibliometric studies, such as that by Bigoni et al. (2024) , often start with initial selections of around one thousand published accounting history articles. This contrasts dramatically with the first bibliography of accounting history, prepared by Bob Parker (1965) , which identified only 231 publications (some in languages other than English). It is now impossible for any individual to keep up to date with the growing historical literature in accounting. Hence, some of the “gaps” that I identify may already be subject to research by accounting historians.

In a study of comparative accounting history (Carnegie & Napier, 2002), Garry Carnegie and I identified seven dimensions that we considered useful for comparing accounting in different countries. These seven dimensions were period, places, people, practices, propagation, products, and profession. In all these dimensions, there is room for extending existing research into new directions, and innovative accounting history research is likely to extend itself along several of these dimensions. As we move well into the twenty-first century, events of the late twentieth century become “historical” (when I studied accounting history under Basil Yamey, his history more or less ended in 1900). Much historical accounting research has examined a limited range of geographical locations, and it is encouraging to note how accounting history research is beginning to explore hitherto largely neglected areas, such as South America, Africa, and China. Research teams are often established with an experienced “Western” accounting historian collaborating with researchers from particular locations: examples include the work of Richard Macve with various Chinese scholars (for example, Yuan et al. [2017]) and Alan Sangster working with Portuguese and Brazilian scholars in examining the accounts of eighteenth-century Portuguese state-sponsored companies operating in Brazil (Vasconcelos et al., 2022).

One effect of the interest in prosopography and microhistory in accounting history research (Carnegie & McBride, 2023) has been to emphasize the roles of people in accounting, as preparers, users, and subjects. Accounting historians often must speculate on how accounts were actually used, as individuals rarely leave specific testimonies about how they went about the process of accounting. Here, oral history approaches can be valuable and may be the only practical way of gathering testimonies that provide insight into the actual practice of accounting in the past. An important aspect of NAH has been to broaden our conception of what “counts as accounting” and “where accounting can be found” (Napier, 2006, pp. 457-459), going well beyond the recording of transactions denominated in money terms. An example of this is the discussion of how state auditors in a U.S. state used census enumeration as a way of categorizing and counting individuals as “disabled” - although financial aspects of the auditors’ roles were relevant, they by no means exhausted the form of “population accounting” represented by the census process (Graham et al., 2023). Hence, how we conceive accounting ‘practices’ continues to expand.

The formation and spread of accounting ideas and practices provide a potentially useful area for historical research. There is often a link with the emergence and development of professional accountancy bodies, but historians are increasingly aware that the British model of the “learned profession” is by no means the only way in which individuals carrying out the activities associated with accounting could be organized; indeed, whether formal organization is necessary or appropriate for many of those undertaking accounting-related tasks. Again, oral history may be a potentially fruitful research method for finding out how accountants, bookkeepers, and others involved in the process of accounting learnt their accounting (the balance between formal instruction and learning on the job will differ in different places and periods) and how their work changed, or perhaps stayed largely the same, through their careers.

The NAH’s most important contribution was its focus on how accounting actually operates in institutions, organizations, and society, but perhaps the objection raised by Watts and Zimmerman (1986) about market-based accounting research applies here as well: is research examining the impact of accounting actually “accounting research” rather than organizational or social research? My suggestion of classifying historical accounting research into “history of accounting” and “socio-historical accounting research” (Napier, 2020, p. 34) was intended to transcend the “traditional”/“new” accounting history categorization, which I saw as relating more to the choice of underlying conceptual frameworks and methods than to research topics. Many studies straddle the boundaries of such categorizations, being histories of accounting practices and ideas, studied within the contexts in which these practices and ideas emerged and operated, at the same time as being socio-historical studies of how the practices and ideas made a difference to individuals, organizations, and societies.

Looking back at nearly 50 years of studying, researching, and writing about the history of accounting, I am impressed by the diversity of topics, periods, locations, theories and theorizations, archives, methods, stories, and narratives that accounting historians have produced and will continue to produce. Forty years ago, Roger Lister (1983) considered historical accounting research to be an “illegitimate” scholarly activity. Since he made this argument, the growing literature of accounting history has served to refute his claim, establishing that history is not just a “legitimate” activity in accounting, but necessary for our understanding of how we got to where we are now, and where we may go in the future.

REFERENCES

• Bertalan, N.-I., & Napier, C. J. (2016). The emergence of “the new accounting history” Paper presented at the 14th World Congress of Accounting Historians, Pescara, Italy.
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• DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
  Not applicable.
• This is a bilingual text. This article has also been translated into Portuguese, published under the DOI https://doi.org/10.1590/1808-057x2026100-8.pt
• The author produced this article specially for Issue 100 of the Accounting & Finance Review at the invitation of the General Editor-in-Chief.

Edited by

• Academic Editor-in-Chief:
  Andson Braga de Aguiar

• Guest Editors:
  Márcia Martins Mendes De Luca, José Alonso Borba, Raquel Wille Sarquis and Daniel Magalhães Mucci

Data availability

Not applicable.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  08 May 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  14 Nov 2025
• Reviewed
  21 Nov 2025
• Accepted
  12 Dec 2025