Mercantilism and accounting remain two dynamic and debated concepts in terms of definition and scope. This volume brings together the research of international scholars from a wide variety of disciplines – accounting, anthropology, native studies, economic geography, economic history and management – to reflect on alternative approaches to the study of these concepts. This book focuses particularly on how individuals across space and time negotiated and navigated systems of exchange and trade, especially when confronted with world views and cultural systems that conflicted with and disrupted perceptions of their own. Through this, the volume offers a helpful reinforcement to the view that the analysis of mercantilism must be more highly contextualised to time and place, along with deeper focus on the local actors involved. It is these local actors who negotiated, exchanged and navigated differing world views and who enable us to tease out the longer-run global economic and social processes and the impacts of these encounters. Complementing the growing interest in mercantilism, Indigenous studies and the relationships between colonists, traders and their counterparts in colonies and trading ports, this work provides a cross disciplinary examination of the subject area. Furthermore, it encourages a renewed interest in the use of archival documents and documentary sources in novel and innovative ways.

The Routledge Companion to Accounting History presents a single-volume synthesis of research in this expanding field, exploring and analysing accounting from ancient civilisations to the modern day. No longer perceived as the narrow study of how a mysterious technique was used in past, the scope of accounting history has widened substantially. This revised and updated volume moves beyond the history of accounting technologies, accounting theories and practices and the accountants who applied them. Expert contributors from around the world explore the interfaces between accounting and the economy, society, culture and the polity. Accounting history is shown to offer important insights into such disparate phenomena as the evolution of capitalism, control of labour, gender and family relationships, racial exploitation, the operation of religious organisations, and the functioning of the state. Illuminating the foundation and development of accounting systems, this updated, classic book opens the field to a new generation of accounting scholars and historians around the world.

Sixteenth-century Europe was powered by commerce. Whilst mercantile groups from many areas prospered, those from the Low Countries were particularly successful. This study, based on extensive archival research, charts the ascent of the merchants established around Antwerp.

One cannot conceive of capitalism without labor. Yet many of the current debates about economic development leading to industrialization fail to directly engage with labor at all. This collection of essays strives to correct this oversight and to reintroduce labor into the great debates about capitalist development and economic growth before the Industrial Revolution. By attending to the effects of specific regulatory, technological, social and physical environments on producers and production in a set of specific industries, these essays use an “ecological” approach that demonstrates how productivity, knowledge and regime changed between 1400 and 1800. This book will be of interest to researchers in history, especially labor history, and European economic development.

This book will examine the gradual assembly and consolidation of Portuguese fiscal policy in the second half of the fifteenth century, providing a comparative analysis of the Portuguese State’s finances and fiscal dynamics with other Western European monarchies. This book examines relevant aspects of the Portuguese Royal finances, particularly the different instruments employed to provide income and the rubrics involving all types of expenditure between the reigns of Afonso V and Manuel I at the dawn of Modern Ages. The analysis of Portugal’s case will also serve as a main conducting wire to a broader fiscal examination of other Latin-rooted Mediterranean and North Atlantic kingdoms. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of economic history, fiscal history, economic theory and history of economic thought, as well as students of Medieval History, the history of the Western Europe and the Iberian Peninsula.

Why was early modern Europe the starting point of the economic expansion which led to the Industrial Revolution? What was the state’s role in this momentous transformation? A History of States and Economic Policies in Early Modern Europe takes a comparative approach to answer these questions, demonstrating that wars, public finance and state intervention in the economy were the key elements underlying European economic dynamics of the era. Structured in two parts, the book begins by examining the central issues of the state–economy relationship, including military revolution, the fiscal state and public finance, mercantilism, the formation of commercial empires and the economic war between Britain and France in the 1700s. The second part presents a detailed comparison between the different economic policies of the most important European states, looking at their unique demographic, economic, military and institutional contexts. Taken as a whole, this work provides a valuable analysis of early modern economic history and a picture of Europe’s global position on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. This book will be useful to students and researchers of economic history, early modern history and European history.

Despite the dramatic expansion of consumer culture from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards and the developments in retailing, advertising and credit relationships in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were a significant number of working families in Britain who were not fully free to consume as they chose. These employees were paid in truck, or in goods rather than currency. This book will explore and analyse the changing ways that truck and workplace deductions were experienced by different groups in British society, arguing that it was far more common than has previously been acknowledged. This analysis brings to light issues of class and gender; the discourse of free trade, popular politics and protest; the development of the trade union movement; and the use of the legal system as an instrument for bringing about social and legal change.