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From ‘pure Satisfaction and Curiosity’ to the ‘particular gain or loss upon each article’: early modern philosophies of accounting in English accounting textbooks

ABSTRACT Beginning with a periodisation of a set of 45 textbooks published in English between 1547 and 1799, and analysed by J. R. Edwards, Graeme Dean, and Frank Clarke in 2009, the study shows that in this sample, a significant shift took place in the use of managerial references between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Moreover, within the second period, the qualitative analysis of a sub-sample of five of these textbooks indicates that these references appeared within different epistemological contexts, not all of them business-related. Early in the 1700s, accounting techniques were presented at first as tools of self-discovery and temperance. Textbooks from the mid-eighteenth century increasingly referred to the pursuit of scientific knowledge, maybe under the influence of the Enlightenment, while late-eighteenth-century authors started to develop a business-oriented epistemology.