Vale Basil S. Yamey

Basil Selig Yamey, who died on 9 November 2020 at the age of 101 years, was a pioneer of historical accounting research, contributing nearly a hundred books, book chapters, journal articles and other publications on accounting history. To put this into context, Basil wrote a further 150 publications in applied economics, which was his main teaching and research activity through his academic career.

Basil was born on 4 May 1919 in Cape Town, the third son of Solomon Yamey (originally Jami) and Leah Yamey (née Halperin). His parents were born in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, and had emigrated to South Africa before the First World War. Basil grew up in Tulbagh, a town about 70 miles north of Cape Town, where his father owned a general store. He attended the local High School, gaining the highest marks in the whole of South Africa in the 1935 matriculation examinations. Basil then took the Bachelor of Commerce degree at the University of Cape Town. Among his teachers was William T Baxter, the Professor of Accounting. Although Basil originally planned to become an articled clerk after graduation, with a view to becoming a chartered accountant, Baxter persuaded Basil to travel to London and begin a PhD under the supervision of Arnold Plant, the Professor of Business Administration at the London School of Economics (LSE). Basil arrived in England on the Capetown Castle on 17 February 1939 and began work on his PhD at the LSE shortly after. ¹

Basil’s thesis title was ‘Shareholders, accounting and the law’, and he made a substantial start on the thesis. His research formed the basis of his first scholarly contributions, a pamphlet for the Accounting Research Association The Functional Development of Double-Entry Bookkeeping (Yamey, 1940) and a study of British dividend law (Yamey, 1941). His research made extensive use of the collection of historical accounting treatises in the library of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). However, with the coming of the Second World War, it was not practical to continue work on the thesis, and Basil returned to South Africa and joined that country’s air force. Following the war, Basil began a teaching career, initially at Rhodes University College (now Rhodes University) and then working with Will Baxter at the University of Cape Town as Senior Lecturer in Commerce. When Will moved to the LSE in 1947, he persuaded Basil to join him, and, except for a short period in Canada, Basil spent the rest of his academic career at the LSE, being promoted to Professor of Economics in 1960. ²

Basil’s historical accounting research is diverse, though three main trends can be discerned. First, Basil challenged the argument that double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) was a necessary factor for the development of capitalism. His most cited accounting history publication ‘Scientific bookkeeping and the rise of capitalism’ (Yamey, 1949), which was based on published textbooks on DEB and on secondary sources, concluded that ‘Accounting served limited objectives and, in particular, the striking of balances was performed primarily for narrow bookkeeping purposes’ (Yamey, 1949: 113). Businesspeople kept accounts to record transactions and keep track of assets and liabilities, not to measure and manage their ‘capital’. Basil was to return to what he saw as overblown claims about the economic and cultural significance of DEB on several occasions (e.g. Yamey, 1964, 2005), extending his evidence base from DEB textbooks to surviving accounting records.

The second trend is his interest in early published writings on DEB, and how earlier books influenced later ones (concluding that later books were often little more than plagiarisms or translations of earlier treatises). His first publication in this area examined the ‘English System of Bookkeeping’ developed at the end of the eighteenth century by Edward Jones (Yamey, 1944), and a significant contribution was the collection of excerpts from English-language textbooks, edited with Basil’s LSE colleague Harold Edey and Hugh Thomson, Librarian of the ICAEW, which provided a compendious guide to how writing about DEB had developed from the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries (Yamey et al., 1963). Basil wrote extensively on Luca Pacioli’s ‘pioneering exposition’ in the first printed treatise on DEB (Summa de Arithmetica, published in 1494). He was sceptical of the quality of Pacioli’s Summa as an accounting textbook (Yamey, 1978), criticising the absence of a worked example of DEB as well as raising a range of presentational and substantive issues. However, in the quincentenary year of the Summa, Basil contributed an introduction to a new translation into English of the relevant sections of the Summa (Yamey, 1994). More recently, Basil challenged the suggestion of Sangster et al. (2008) that Pacioli’s Summa ‘. . . was intended primarily as a reference text for merchants and as a school text for their sons’ (p. 131). Basil made the case that the Summa was neither an effective text for merchants nor a suitable teaching text (Yamey, 2010), but his arguments were extensively rebutted by Sangster et al. (2011).

The third important trend comes from Basil’s interest in art. He was a trustee of the National Gallery in London from 1974 to 1981 and of the Tate Gallery in London from 1978 to 1981. He was invited to use his art knowledge to put together a book for an Italian bank on how accounting was portrayed in old master paintings, and a revised version of this book in English, Art & Accounting (Yamey, 1989) was published by Yale University Press to great acclaim. Basil illustrated how account books often featured in portraits of businesspeople, still-life paintings, allegories of commerce and paintings of commercial scenes.

Many accounting historians (including myself) were introduced to the field through Studies in the History of Accounting (Littleton and Yamey, 1956), a collection of writings on a wide range of accounting history topics, many specially commissioned for the book. Will Baxter had edited a similar collection a few years earlier (Baxter, 1950), aiming to provide scholarly studies that could be used for teaching purposes.

Most of Basil’s research in the early 1950s had been in the field of applied economics rather than accounting history. He worked extensively with his LSE colleague Peter Bauer in the area of development economics, jointly writing the influential book The Economics of Under-developed Countries (Bauer and Yamey, 1957). He also specialised in the economics of retail trade, being a staunch critic of supplier price-fixing through ‘retail price maintenance’ (Yamey, 1954). Basil tended to take what would now be identified as a ‘neo-liberal’ position on economics, favouring markets over central planning and regulation, and he was an active member of the Institute for Economic Affairs, a free market ‘think tank’ founded in 1955. Following the publication of Studies in the History of Accounting, Basil’s research balanced economics and accounting history.

I met Basil in 1978, when I was a student on the MSc in Accounting and Finance at the LSE. Basil contributed to a course on business and accounting history, and the small number of students taking this course meant that it could operate as a genuine research seminar. The reading list was comprised almost entirely of articles by Basil or chapters from Studies in the History of Accounting, and for Basil, accounting history clearly ended in 1900, as developments in the twentieth century were scarcely mentioned.

In 1980, Basil gave a keynote address at the Third World Congress of Accounting Historians, which took place at the London Business School. He argued that it was too early to attempt to write a general history of accounting, because there was so much more for historians to discover, making ‘premature generalisation’ a significant risk (Yamey, 1981). Basil retired from the LSE in 1984 (I took over the teaching of accounting history from him), but he continued to be an active researcher and writer for another 30 years.

Basil’s reputation suffered with the emergence of the ‘new accounting history’ towards the end of the 1980s. He was criticised by Miller and Napier (1993) for relying too heavily on accounting treatises and secondary sources in his analysis of the claim that DEB was important for capitalism, and more generally for emphasising DEB at the expense of other approaches to accounting. Although Miller and Napier did not explicitly use the word, it was easy to identify Basil’s interest in the obscure details of book publication and accounting entries as ‘antiquarian’. The new accounting history was suspicious of theorisations of accounting’s past based on neo-classical economics. Basil was squarely within this theoretical tradition, and although he rarely emphasised theoretical arguments in his historical writings, he tended to assess DEB in terms of its utility for effective business decision-making (Yamey, 1964).

Among more traditional accounting historians, however, Basil has always been held in the greatest regard. He was awarded the Hourglass Award by the Academy of Accounting Historians in both 1976 and 1992, for his ‘demonstrable and significant contribution to knowledge through research and publication in accounting history’. His work was crucial in turning accounting history (at least among Anglophone scholars) from a hobby into a serious research field, and his exemplary scholarship across several languages is a model for subsequent generations of researchers. Today’s historians of accounting stand on the shoulders of Basil Yamey.