Accounting and the exploitation of the natural world: Studies from a historical perspective

Abstract

This article introduces the Special Issue of Accounting History on the topic of accounting and the exploitation of the natural world. After exploring the ambivalent nature of the word ‘exploitation’, with both positive and negative senses, the article reviews some earlier contributions to the historical accounting research literature relevant to the Special Issue. The four substantive research papers in the Special Issue are discussed and put into broader contexts, and the article identifies some potentially fruitful avenues for further research into how accounting has been implicated in the exploitation of the natural world in the past. The article concludes with brief tributes to two recently deceased accounting academics, Professor Tom Schneider and Professor Mike Jones, whose contributions to the Special Issue and to stimulating research into accounting for biodiversity, respectively, are acknowledged.

Introduction

The initial idea for this Special Issue of Accounting History came from Garry Carnegie. An important part of Carnegie's research work, including his PhD thesis (Carnegie, 1994 – later published in a book form as Carnegie, 1997), involved the study of the early accounting records of pastoral farmers in Victoria, then a British colony in Australia. Carnegie subsequently combined this research with that of Christopher Napier into the accounts of large British aristocratic estates (Napier, 1991) in an international comparative study, examining how accounting in two different geographical locations could be compared with significant similarities and differences identified and explained (Carnegie and Napier, 2002). In this study, Carnegie and Napier developed an analytical framework with seven factors that might provide explanations: period, places, people, practices, propagation, products, and profession (known colloquially as ‘the seven Ps’ – Carnegie and Napier, 2017: 82). Napier (1991) observed that, although much of the income of significant British landowners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came from agriculture, many aristocratic landowners benefitted from the mining of coal, iron ore and other metals. Carnegie suggested that Napier should be a co-editor of the Special Issue, which should cover not just historical accounting research into agriculture but should also extend to extractive activities.

The initial Call for Papers (Carnegie and Napier, 2020) suggested a wide understanding of agriculture, including pastoral, arable, intensive animal rearing, forestry and viticulture, while extractive activities were explicitly linked to oil and gas and implicitly to the mining of coal and minerals. However, the expression ‘exploitation of the natural world’ could embrace a broad range of human activities. The word ‘exploitation’ itself turned out to have ambivalent overtones. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ¹ the earliest meaning, dating from 1795, is ‘The action of extracting or harvesting natural resources from a place; the action of deriving value from a natural resource by harvesting’, with a later meaning suggesting that exploitation leads to benefit: ‘The action or fact of deriving benefit from something by making full or good use of it; an instance of this’. However, a third meaning, dating from 1832, is less positive in tone: ‘The action or fact of taking advantage of something or someone in an unfair or unethical manner; utilisation of something for one's own ends’. This definition brings out the notion that exploitation is not just of things but also of people, and the definition also suggests that the title of the Special Issue was unconsciously ‘othering’ the natural world as something separate from the people who populate it. Humanity was perhaps being seen by default as the exploiter rather than as the exploited. Critical accounting research increasingly recognises how changes in the natural environment can have significant impacts on populations, for example, by being an important factor underlying migrations (Agyemang and Lehman, 2013). The Call for Papers implied that accounting could affect individuals working in agricultural and extractive contexts, but the conception of humanity as part of the natural world would be too broad for the scope of the Special Issue.

Unfortunately, Carnegie was unable to continue as a co-editor of the Special Issue, and he was replaced by Lisa Jack, who has researched extensively in accounting for agriculture. Her PhD (Jack, 2004) examined how accounting practices introduced into British agriculture after the Second World War persisted even as agriculture became transformed. She has continued to research the economics, accounting and finance of farming and the food industry (e.g. Hayden et al., 2021, 2022). Of particular relevance to the Special Issue, Jack (2020) contributed a chapter on agriculture to The Routledge Companion to Accounting History, in which she looked at studies of farm accounts and other records, noting that much work using these archival materials had been undertaken not by accounting historians but by economic, social and specialist agricultural historians. Despite this, she concluded that ‘If there is a re-emergence of research at the interface of accounting and agriculture, as Sargiacomo et al. (2016) claim, then there are many gaps to be filled’ (Jack, 2020: 404). Jack (2015) has also examined how attempts to introduce innovative accounting systems based on double-entry bookkeeping into the Australian agricultural sector in the 1960s were largely unsuccessful.

In this editorial introduction to the Special Issue, we briefly review some of the existing historical studies of accounting in the context of agriculture and extraction. We then put the four substantive research articles contained in the Special Issue into a broader context, showing how they identify different ways of tackling accounting issues relating to the natural world from a historical perspective. The section that follows sets out an agenda for future historical research studies in accounting for the exploitation of the natural world, and our article finishes with some concluding reflections.

Some previous historical research on accounting and the exploitation of the natural world

Agriculture

As already noted, Jack (2020) reviews historical studies of accounting and agriculture. She discusses the types of records that can survive, only some of which take the form of conventional financial accounting books and documents. Surviving records often enable the contemporary historian to assess how farmers used information to help in their decision-making, although it is necessary to recognise that, for long periods of time, the activities of a typical farm did not change much from year to year, and good or bad performance often depended on factors outside the control of the farmer, such as the weather. Jack identifies several ‘case studies’ or ‘microhistories’ of individual farms and farmers, as well as broader studies of how accounting has been used by farmers in the past. A notable example of this is the study by Walker (2014, 2015) of how farmers in the USA during the Great Depression of the 1930s were encouraged to maintain and use accounting records as part of the US government's New Deal campaign, with financial support dependent on the adoption of suitable record systems.

Studies of individual farms can bring out the extent to which agriculture can provide an ‘accounting laboratory’ (Giraudeau, 2017: 211) in which, over the ages, a wide range of accounting methods have been tried out. Of the most significant accounting systems in wide use, double entry most likely emerged in a mercantile setting (Sangster, 2016), but the charge and discharge approach, with its emphasis on accountability by those managing land to a superior lord or abbot, seems to be more deeply rooted in agriculture (Noke, 1981). The persistence of the charge and discharge system on British landed estates well into the twentieth century suggests that accountability relationships tended to change only slowly, even as capitalist farming, and increased use of double entry at the individual farm level, was emerging (Bryer, 2006).

More recent published studies show that the adoption of new accounting ideas and methods in agriculture is often resisted until some external shock creates a demand for accounting numbers. Hendrikx and Gelderblom (2022) show that in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century, farmers tended to rely on unstructured records and memory to keep track of cash and amounts receivable and payable, even though they were encouraged to adopt more systematic accounting records. It took the extension of income tax to farmers to motivate those in the agricultural sector to prepare accounts for fiscal purposes, ² rather than for improving farm productivity. However, Levant and Zimnovitch (2022) suggest that, in the nineteenth century in France, there is evidence that there was more interest in accounting and costing for agriculture than for manufacturing. They provide a case study of one of the major contributors to the French literature of agricultural accounting, de Dombasle, who managed a model farm that probably used the accounting systems that he advocated in his writings. However, Levant and Zimnovitch (2022: 592) ‘ask how sophisticated the accounting methods actually used on farms were’. We cannot deduce from the absence of surviving farm accounts that farmers did not keep accounting records, but systematic records are more likely to survive than the less structured ones.

Sometimes, our knowledge of likely forms and use of accounts in the past agricultural settings comes indirectly from textbooks used in teaching potential farmers. Semeraro and Gregorini (2021) examine local government education initiatives in Italy at the end of the nineteenth century, noting that activities in rural areas often involved the training of children of farmers. At least one institution operated a model farm and workshops, and students used accounting records to assess the costs involved in growing different crops on the land. This study mainly focuses on the accounting and managerial records of educational institutions, but those interested in the history of agricultural accounting can gain useful insights and also identify archives that could be investigated in more depth. Another important area of historical accounting research has been the study of accounting in the household (Walker and Llewellyn, 2000), and research by Rossi (2022) into the records of Silvia Rabatta, a widow living in Friuli (now part of Italy) in the eighteenth century, shows how she used accounting information to hold farm managers accountable and to make decisions about how to best exploit her landed estate. Another study focused on the role of an individual, by Masiero (2020), examines the ways in which an Italian economist and landowner, Leone Wollemborg, used face-to-face narrative accountability methods to ‘examine’ farmers seeking cooperative credit, thus constituting members of the rural population as ‘accountable selves’.

Although farm histories tend to show how difficult it was, and still is, to survive financially in agriculture, large-scale agricultural plantations have a different accounting story. This is often presented as the epitome of wealth extraction and transfer from colonised territories to their colonisers. Although industrial-scale agriculture has been evident from ancient times, it is the colonial establishment of plantations – for tea, coffee, cotton, palm oil, rubber, timber and other agricultural commodities – that has concerned most researchers in our field. At the forefront, rightly, is the appalling history of enslaved labour on plantations alongside the displacement of indigenous and poor peoples from their lands to make way for plantations. Tyson, Fleischman and Oldroyd have written several papers that examine the way in which enslaved peoples in North America and the Caribbean were accounted for as so many goods and chattels, with attendant expenses and profits on sale, thereby further stripped of their humanity (e.g. Fleischman et al., 2004; Tyson and Oldroyd, 2019). Barney and Flescher (1994) showed that the keeping of ledgers of enslaved people ran alongside ledgers of their productivity in picking cotton. This need for management accounting and management control in running a plantation, and the industrial efficiency that relied so much on bonded labour, is critically evaluated by Alawattage and Wickramasinghe (2009) in their historical account of plantations in British Ceylon in the nineteenth century. They show how the patterns of control developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Caribbean provided a model for colonial plantations in the Indian subcontinent. Extending beyond plantations to whole geographical regions, Power and Brennan (2022: 1) show how the British South Africa Company, which had been given extensive rights by the British government over the colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), used rhetorics of quantification to ‘mask its exploitation of the colony's native population’.

Another important element of the accounting histories of plantations is the examination of surviving accounting records that show the development of recordkeeping and control from a distance suited to the emerging industrial-scale production and export of agricultural and forestry commodities. Cowton and O'Shaughnessy (1991) follow one family of absentee owners of a plantation in the West Indies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to establish control over people, production and profits from overseas. Heier (1988), Fleischman et al. (2011) and Razek (1985) are examples of papers that examine the practices and books of advice on plantation accounting, while Rosenthal's (2019) detailed analysis of accounting, plantations and capitalism brings together the many issues and concerns that continue to exist in industrial-scale agriculture. In particular, she tackles the question of wealth transfer from developing to developed countries and from the poor to the already wealthy.

The aspect of plantations that has not been examined in any depth by accounting historians, and that would have been significant for this Special Issue, is the land degradation resulting from plantations. This includes deforestation, by both plantation owners and displaced small-scale farmers seeking new land to farm. Analysis of the records of land management, and of disappearing resources, as well as attempts to restore soil fertility or forested areas can be found in other disciplines. An example would be Deacon (1999) from a land economics perspective. He examines the historical records that demonstrate a link between deforestation, insecure ownership and growing populations. The exploitation of land and resources, of the natural world, is very much linked to the processes of industrial agriculture.

Extractive industries

Turning to the extractive industries, mining has long been a focus of historical accounting research, and the estate owners who practised large-scale agriculture often also developed mines on those lands. Coal mining in South Wales has been investigated most notably by Edwards and Boyns, with much of the evidence of the development of cost and management accounting in their book A History of Management Accounting: The British Experience (Edwards and Boyns, 2012) coming from extractive industries. ³ Coal mining was often closely integrated with iron and steel production, and Boyns and Edwards (1996, 1997) discuss how costing methods developed in the more innovative coal mines gradually diffused through emulation to other coal mines. There was also a degree of interchange between different coal fields, and practices developed in the North-East could be copied in South Wales and vice versa. Accounting in the Durham coal mines has been studied by Oldroyd (1999) (see also Brackenborough et al., 2001), who examined the estate records of the Bowes family, a major Durham coal owner in the eighteenth century and afterwards, to observe how the records of the coal mines were kept and likely used. ⁴ Oldroyd has also compared coal accounting in the North-East of England with the same industry in Nova Scotia, Canada (Fleischman and Oldroyd, 2001), finding that accounting for capital improvements and estimation of profitability of new workings was less well developed in Canada, although in both locations there was a lack of interest in tracking individual miners in terms of their productivity.

Although coal mining was the dominant extractive industry in Britain, tin mining was also important and gave rise to a peculiar form of organisation, the ‘cost book company’ (Morris, 1997). Studies of these companies often focus on how the accounts, which were largely kept on a cash basis, were used to determine profit shares and how the companies were managed. Elsewhere, mining could be a source of accounting standardisation, especially if any form of state regulation became involved. Vent and Milne (1989, 1997, 2000) examine mining mainly in the USA, considering the extraction of precious metals (such as gold and silver) and base metals (such as lead) and how accounting records were used to monitor and control production.

Historical studies of accounting in the context of mining often emphasise the use of accounting information for planning and assessing possible investments and the potential of costing records to be used to monitor the efficiency of individual members of the workforce. At various times, monitoring at the individual level was not important to mine owners, as forms of labour sub-contracting were often used, whereby ‘gangmasters’ contracted directly with the owners and themselves employed the miners. However, historical studies of mine accounts have rarely considered the extent to which mining exploits the natural world by extracting non-renewable resources. Morris (1986) investigated how mining companies at the end of the nineteenth century treated the depreciation of their capital assets. The English law case Lee v. Neuchatel Asphalte Company (1889) decided that extractive companies were under no obligation to retain resources to reflect the depreciation or depletion of their ‘wasting assets’, meaning that accounting could ignore the cost of depletion. Morris (1986) found that, following this decision, many British mining companies stopped or reduced their provisions for depreciation, but this was less common among Australian companies.

Despite the importance of the oil and gas sector, accounting historians have rarely investigated the accounting systems used or how accounting information fed into business and even political decision-making. An important exception to this is the work of Neveen Abdelrehim. Her PhD thesis (Abdelrehim, 2010) used business archives, including accounting records, of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP) to study the company's response to nationalisation by the Iranian government in 1951 and how the company drew on financial records and accounting calculations to resist this nationalisation and to challenge the government's proposed terms. Subsequent journal articles (Abdelrehim et al., 2011, 2012) expanded on the thesis, while a later study (Abdelrehim et al., 2015) compared narrative reporting of BP and Shell before and after the Suez Crisis of 1956. This research is interesting in being presented as a contribution to accounting history. An earlier study of Shell's social and environmental disclosures spanning a whole century by Unerman (2001), despite being a significant longitudinal examination of narrative accounting, was not considered by the author to be historical accounting research. ⁵ This example suggests that there may be several articles and even books that in effect provide histories of accounting phenomena without necessarily being identified by their authors as ‘history’.

One of the few historical accounting studies of the oil and gas industry is more an examination of accounting regulation than an investigation into how oil and gas companies have exploited the natural world. Cortese (2011) reviewed the accounting standard-setting process in the USA in the 1970s for dealing with the costs of oil and gas exploration. Should companies be required to write off the costs of unsuccessful drilling for oil and gas on a well-by-well basis (the ‘successful efforts’ method), or should they be able to capitalise such costs and assess their recoverability across a whole exploration programme (the ‘full cost’ method)? At the time, smaller oil companies tended to use the ‘full cost’ method, which deferred cost recognition and hence led to higher reported profits in earlier periods. They argued that being required to write off the costs of unsuccessful exploration on a well-by-well basis would deter exploration and thus lead to lower rates of extraction. In the 1970s, this was presented as an undesirable outcome for society, but by the 2020s, the use of an accounting method that might tend to leave fossil fuels in the ground would be considered by many to be a positive choice.

A natural resource that is increasingly a matter of concern is water. Studies of accounting for water are emerging in the environmental and sustainability accounting literature (e.g. Chalmers et al., 2012), but this is still a field offering rich possibilities for historical accounting research. Again, studies exist that cover long periods, such as the investigation by Jollands and Quinn (2017) of the sustainability of water supply in Ireland, but these may not be presented by their authors as contributions to accounting history literature. Jollands and Quinn (2017: 168) are aware of the importance of history to the understanding of social phenomena: ‘[U]nderstanding the history of a specific thing, through examining how and why something has become over time, is as important as understanding what the thing is’. So, opportunities exist for fully historical studies of how water was or often was not accounted for in the past and how attitudes to the sustainability of water supplies and the need to control water demands have shaped changes in accounting practices, including (as do Jollands and Quinn, 2017) the ways in which consumers are charged for and thereby made accountable for their usage of this vital commodity.

Accounting for the exploitation of the natural world overlaps with several other recent research directions in accounting history. One of these is accounting for biodiversity (Jones, 2014; Jones and Solomon, 2013), ⁶ and the other is extinction accounting (Atkins and Maroun, 2018). Historical studies of accounting for biodiversity include an examination of how the nineteenth-century artist, textile designer and writer William Morris engaged in attempts to preserve ‘nature’ through campaigns for the maintenance and extension of commons and other open spaces (Atkins and Thomson, 2014). Although most research using the concept of extinction accounting considers the present and near future, historical studies are beginning to emerge, one of which (McBride et al., 2023) uses the annual reports of a nineteenth-century Russian company hunting for furs in Siberia and Alaska to examine how the company reported on its initiatives for addressing the risk of species depletion and even extinction, thus holding itself accountable for maintaining species populations. Accounting for biodiversity and extinction accounting come together in the study by Atkins and Maroun (2020) of the eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White and how he used his ‘nature diaries’ to record the populations of wildlife around his home in Hampshire, thus being able to monitor both the diversity of species and their growth and decline. The historical study of accounting for environment and ecology has recently been encouraged through a Special Issue of Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, where the editors (Atkins et al., 2023) advance the claim that many artefacts that predate writing may be understood as forms of ecological accounts.

In the next section, we put the four substantive research articles contained in this Special Issue into the context of the previous literature.

Articles in the Special Issue

The four research articles included in the Special Issue cover a range of topics and use various theoretical frameworks and research methods. Morton and Tsahuridu (2023) provide an example of extinction accounting in their examination of how accounting played a part in the extinction of the thylacine (also known as the Tasmanian tiger). They observe that pressures from agricultural interests, often represented by colonial settlers, to reduce the population of thylacines, involved a process of ‘framing’ these animals as voracious predators on flocks of sheep. Accounting supported this process through the introduction of ‘bounties’: rewards given to those who could show that they had killed a thylacine. At a fairly banal level, records of bounties created an accounting-based archive that provides evidence of the decline of the thylacine, but the existence of bounties also implied various attitudes towards accountability for the natural world. A desire to exploit the land for commercial pastoral agriculture came into conflict with a responsibility for preserving biodiversity.

Bujaki et al. (2023) build on earlier work by Bujaki and others (Bujaki, 2010, 2015; Bujaki and McConomy, 2022) relating to the Rideau Canal in Canada. In this article, the authors interrogate the accountability documents of both the Rideau Canal and the Erie Canal in the USA, to assess the underlying environmental philosophy being reflected by these documents. They find that the dominant philosophy is one of utilitarianism, as disclosures tend to emphasise the advantages to economic development of constructing the canals, while largely ignoring negative impacts on the environment and on indigenous peoples. The authors conclude that a utilitarian approach embodies the view that it is morally appropriate for humans to exploit the natural world for human (particularly colonial settler) benefit. The authors find, however, that some of the accountability documents express a ‘virtue ethics’ philosophy that stresses the integration of humans and nature and the ‘cooperation’ of nature with the canal builders through the provision of watercourses that could form part of the canals’ routes. They suggest that surveying and building the canals put humans into direct contact with the ‘wilderness’. Bujaki et al. (2023) conclude that their approach provides a way of analysing accountability disclosures over periods of time to identify shifts in attitudes towards the exploitation of the natural world.

Maran et al. (2023) examine the use of accounting for managing water supply and demand in Trento, a province in Northern Italy, in the second half of the twentieth century. They use the concept of ‘territorialisation’, the ways in which accounts can create ‘calculable spaces’ within social and economic life. The term ‘accounts’ can be interpreted widely, so it does not necessarily imply records kept in financial terms. Accounts can make it possible for different actors to interact and provide information relevant to the evaluation of activities. The construction of the Santa Giustina dam in 1939 created various issues around the use of both water and hydropower, and Maran et al. (2023) show how tensions can arise between the controller of the dam (the provincial government) and those holding rights to distribute the power generated by the dam. The authors base their analysis on a range of written and visual material and a small number of interviews, something that is possible given that the period of analysis is relatively close to the present day.

Finally, Modarelli et al. (2023) investigate the use of accounting in determining compensation for war damages relating to the bombing of hemp warehouses in the province of Caserta, in southern Italy, and how the calculations involved helped reveal the underlying poverty of hemp growers and stimulated the need for agrarian reform. They draw on a range of archival material and contemporary newspaper and magazine articles and employ neo-institutional theory to put the use of accounting calculations into a broader socio-economic context.

The four articles bring out the tensions in the meaning of the word ‘exploitation’. Is developing land in colonies for commercial agriculture a benign example of exploitation, leading to benefits for humans, or is it malign, reducing biodiversity by making a species extinct (Morton and Tsahuridu, 2023)? Does building of canals provide moral benefits by giving humans experience of the ‘wilderness’, and by opening areas up for colonial settlement, or does it exacerbate the negative exploitation of indigenous peoples and nature (Bujaki et al., 2023)? Does building of a dam that increases the electric power available to a region allow for economic development and growth or lead to threats to the on-going supply of water (Maran et al., 2023)? Does compensation for war damage help stimulate agrarian reform that enhances productivity on hemp farms, or does it threaten a traditional way of life (Modarelli et al., 2023)? Although specific authors may not express these dilemmas explicitly in these terms, their contributions, which cover different types of exploitation of the natural world across two centuries on three different continents, provide much food for thought. In the next section, we suggest some possible research directions for historical investigations of accounting for the exploitation of the natural world.

Some research directions

In her review of historical studies of accounting in agriculture, Jack (2020: 404) referred to ‘missing histories’, suggesting that there could be many more case study/microhistory examinations of accounting by individual farmers and landowners, investigating not only the form of whatever accounts they kept but also how they were likely to have used the information that the accounts contained and created. Although, in many parts of the world, agriculture involves a large number of small producers working limited amounts of land, increasingly we can observe the rise of ‘agribusiness’, with farming on an industrial scale by large corporate entities. Accounting is not just a matter of keeping basic records and informing management decisions, but it becomes involved in financial reporting. It is now over 20 years since the publication of International Accounting Standard 41 Agriculture (International Accounting Standards Committee, 2000), which adopted a fair value measurement approach for what it identified as ‘biological assets’ (see, e.g. Argilés and Slof, 2001). Over 20 years later, opportunities exist for retrospective historical studies of the political process around the development and promulgation of IAS 41 and longitudinal studies of the implementation of the standard in particular entities, geographical locations and forms of agriculture. The standard is primarily intended for corporate entities, but, as Jack (2020:405) observes: ‘What is also missing is any history of corporate farming’.

In undertaking historical research into accounting and the exploitation of the natural world, we can already observe in some of the contributions to this Special Issue a broadening in how ‘accounts’ are understood. Day-to-day records kept in monetary terms and periodic financial and management reports will continue to represent important sources, but, as contributors to Handbook of Accounting, Accountability and Governance (Carnegie and Napier, 2023) show, accountability is achieved through a wide range of methods, not just through records maintained in terms of money. Physical records of crops and animals, showing inputs and outputs of resources, have always been central to agriculture and are also important to extractive industries. Sometimes, as in the case of some fossil fuel reserves that may no longer be exploitable (‘unburnable carbon’), only physical measures make sense, despite demands for value-based measurements and disclosures (Bebbington et al., 2020). Historical accounting research is generally based on primary sources, but what constitutes a ‘source’ is expanding.

A focus on the point of initial exploitation of the natural world, whether that relates to the production of crops, extraction of oil, gas and minerals or the raising of livestock, may tend to overlook the extent to which this is just the first stage in a complex supply chain leading ultimately to the provision of end products to consumers. For example, the growing of crops is increasingly integrated with the production of food and beverages. Accounting records can often reveal such supply chains, and historical studies that investigate how companies in developed countries have dealt with their upstream suppliers of various commodities would be valuable. The work of Spraakman (1999, 2006; Spraakman and Wilkie, 2000), examining how the Hudson's Bay Company, based in London, managed at a distance the exploitation of wildlife in Canada by trappers and fur traders, provides an example of this type of research.

As several contributions to this Special Issue note, national and local governments often become involved in activities that feature the exploitation of the natural world. In some cases, this may be through direct actions, such as the construction of infrastructure that may have a negative impact on the environment, and in other cases, it may involve the provision of grants and subsidies. Accounting records can provide evidence of government involvement, and how the state can incentivise certain practices and deter others, and historians can also study how the government used accounting-based calculations to justify or reject major development proposals. Some of the debates around important government decisions were examined at the time in the accounting literature (e.g. the discussion by Berry et al., 1985, of the use of questionable costing data in the National Coal Board to justify mine closures in the mid-1980s in the UK), and historians may be able to use archival material not available at the time to develop new insights into the use and abuse of accounting and economic calculation by governments in the past.

As we noted in the Introduction to this article, humans are also part of the natural world and can be exploited as well as being exploiters. This means that there are problems in deciding on the boundaries of accounting for the exploitation of the natural world, as this could extend into what has in the past been referred to as social accounting as well as the more traditional environmental accounting. The expression ‘social and environmental accounting’ (SEA), often associated with Rob Gray (see, e.g. Gray et al., 1995), has increasingly been supplanted by the expression ‘environmental, social and governance’ (ESG – see, e.g. Atkins and McBride, 2023), but both these terms suggest that there are advantages in treating accounting for humans and accounting for the natural world as linked but not identical. However, the impact of the natural environment on human activities not just now but in the past is certainly worth studying through an accounting lens, and again, existing historical accounting research focusing on slavery (see, e.g. Fleischman et al., 2004) recognises that slaves in the USA and West Indies typically laboured on plantations, producing crops such as sugar and tobacco.

Accounting historians must also be aware of the use of accounting records by historians who identify themselves as working in cognate, though distinct, fields, and there is a considerable use of accounting material found in archives by economic, business, organisational and agricultural historians. Although we have referred to some of this research in this article, there is a need for systematic and critical examinations of these cognate literatures, so that accounting historians can both draw on and go beyond existing research into the exploitation of the natural world that uses accounts. Conversely, accounting historians can contribute to literatures beyond a narrow and circumscribed notion of what ‘belongs’ to accounting history: indeed, we have cited in this article several contributions to journals such as Business History as well as items published in both generalist accounting and specialist accounting history journals. Whether we use terms such as ‘environmental accounting’, ‘accounting for biodiversity’, ‘sustainability accounting’ or ‘ecological accounting’, which extend to include accountability and governance issues, there is a considerable scope for historical studies, so that we know what accounting has been capable of achieving (both positively and negatively) in the past and therefore gain insights into how accounting may develop in the future.

Final remarks

In the final stages of completing this Special Issue, two deaths have overshadowed our work. On 3 June 2023, one of the contributors to this Special Issue, Tom Schneider, passed away at the age of 59. He was a co-author of the study by Maran et al. (2023), where he brought his long-standing interest in environmental accounting (see, e.g. Cho et al., 2020) and sustainability, as well as specialist knowledge of the environmental importance of water rights and the accounting and accountability implications of such rights (Schneider and Andreaus, 2018). His obituary ⁷ shows how deeply attuned he was to the natural world: ‘Tom's academic journey was impressive and spanned music (opera), business (MBA Wilfrid Laurier), and accounting (PhD University of Waterloo, CPA, CMA). He was a faculty member at the University of Alberta before joining Toronto Metropolitan University as an Associate Professor of Environmental and Social Accounting. Tom's passion for environmental protection and ethics informed his many academic contributions and collaborations, including membership on the United Nations Expert Group on Resource Management’.

On 4 September 2023, Mike Jones, whose work relating to accounting for biodiversity has already been referred to in this article (Jones and Solomon, 2013; Jones, 2014), also passed away. Mike made seminal contributions to our understanding of the importance of narrative communication in corporate reports (e.g. Jones and Shoemaker, 1994), and he was also a prolific accounting historian. He studied how accounting at the University of Oxford and its colleges was affected by tensions between the communitarianism that underpinned the colleges and the desire of the state to regulate the university (Jones, 1994), as well as examining how English government accounts developed in the middle ages (Jones, 2010), with particular attention to the contribution of the Domesday Book as an accounting narrative (Jones, 2018). Again, a love of nature was also evident in his private life, from discussions about nature reserves in Hampshire, known from his early career at the University of Portsmouth, through to his work at Cardiff University and the University of Bristol. In 2022, Mike was presented with the Distinguished Accounting Academic Award by the British Accounting and Finance Association (BAFA). He was a long-term supporter of BAFA, leading the Financial Reporting SIG and the Financial Reporting and Business Communication conference for over 25 years. The deaths of Tom and Mike both represent significant losses to the academic community in accounting generally and historical accounting research more particularly.