British traditions and contributions to accounting history research

Abstract

Studies of Britain's accounting history date from the second half of the nineteenth century. Up to 1970 contributions to what became labelled the ‘traditional’ accounting history literature came from authors with diverse backgrounds – for example, archivists, civil servants, economists, (non-accounting) historians, lawyers, librarians, government employees and accounting practitioners. Accounting remained on the periphery of academe, through to the 1960s, thereby explaining the lack of historiographical contributions from accounting faculty. The theoretical underpinning of historical studies was increasingly recognised, post-1970, with investigations explicitly grounded in economics by the so-called neoclassicists. The second half of the 1980s, in Britain, saw a methodological revolution in the study of accounting's past accelerate through a movement christened ‘The new accounting history’. Key venues for the circulation and publication of studies informed by theories taken from numerous other disciplines included the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting Conference, first held in Manchester in 1985, and support provided by Accounting, Organizations and Society and other high-ranking academic journals for the publication of historical studies into the behavioural, organisational and sociological positioning of accounting. Participation in accounting history research by academics from other sectors of academe has featured prominently in the growth in interdisciplinarity.