Accounting and death: An historical perspective

Abstract

This article introduces the Special Issue of Accounting History examining the intersection of accounting and death from an historical perspective. Following an initial conceptualisation of death as a social phenomenon and accounting as a practice, we reflect on earlier contributions to the accounting history literature to establish the context and introduce the research articles included in this Special Issue. These articles extend our understanding of accounting and death in a number of ways. They show how accounts of death can be transactional, how accounts for death contribute to necroaccountability, and how death can be a profitable business undertaking (necrocapitalism) in exceptional circumstances. We conclude by further challenging accounting historians to contemplate other ways in which accounting and accountability meet with death in everyday life.

Introduction

This special issue was designed to extend our understanding of accounting for death in history, both conceptually and empirically. Prior literature where death and accounting coalesce is generally within the context of institutions (see Moerman and van der Laan, 2022, for a summary). Military, medical, or welfare organisations, or contexts where labour is institutionalised, have previously found favour with researchers who seek to provide insights into accounting for death as an empirical phenomenon. For example, slavery practices and military conflicts treat accounting for death as a simple aggregation or count (see, e.g., Baker, 2019; Funnell and Chwastiak, 2010). These studies demonstrate how calculative practices transform death to enable a transaction through enumeration or valuation, such as the inventory-style accounting used in respect of enslaved people (see, e.g., Fleischman et al., 2004; Tyson and Oldroyd, 2019). This stream of research into accounting for death reduces death to a transactional phenomenon operationalised by calculative practices.

Since ‘calculation is one of the most convincing ways by which … effective decisions can be made in potentially controversial arrangements’, calculative practices around death provide an opportunity to direct attention away from situations where qualitative arguments are more likely be subject to critique, challenge or controversy (Porter, 1992: 28). For example, in situations where death is related to armed conflict, disasters or even COVID-19, the quantification of death enhances truth claims within a particular discourse. Once death has been defined and then counted, any differing or distinguishing attributes of individuals become opaque. This abstraction and reductionism also alter approaches to accountability as the focus shifts from the subject of accountability to the quantification of it (van der Laan et al., 2022).

In situations where death is the consequence of intended or unintended organisational or institutional activity, a responsibility arises to provide an account of death as a form of accountability (see, e.g., Funnell et al., 2022; Sargiacomo et al., 2012). This account of death gives rise to a novel accountability relationship described as necroaccountability. We invited authors to extend this concept of necroaccountability by considering historical situations where death was related to a business profiting from death. As a result, the five articles published in this Special Issue contribute in diverse and meaningful ways across all three aspects of the nexus of accounting and death: accounts of, accounts for, and the business of death. The articles cover over 400 years of accounting through various non-traditional accounts and utilise a range of theoretical insights. Importantly, as we reflect on Agyemang's (2024) assertion that accounting and accountability are situational and are always underpinned by some form of power imbalance, the articles included provide support for that view by acknowledging that accounting systems and accountability in relation to death are invariably only understood within the specific time and space in which they are enacted.

In the following section, we outline death as a social phenomenon by sketching out the three aspects of death and accounting. We then introduce the five articles that constitute this special issue. We conclude by providing a challenge for future accounting history research.

Death as a phenomenon

Death as a social phenomenon is generally viewed as a binary construct and confined to the mutually exclusive categories of human life and death. In this Special Issue, we have expanded the concept to include financial or property loss (Lippman and Grimmer, 2026) and political death (Twyford et al., 2026). And while each type of death is situated within its unique social and cultural realm, how it is represented rests with the living. Consequently, accounts of death leave traces: these can take many forms, ranging from images or objects of death, such as hieroglyphics or indigenous cave paintings, to detailed written accounts, such as those in the form of obituaries or biographies. It is when these accounts of death become subject to calculative practices that they become of particular interest to accounting researchers. Quantification through calculative practices such as classification and aggregation is powerful. This quantification is socially constructed, rhetorically exploitable and potentially dehumanising (Potter et al., 1991).

In our initial study of death and accounting practice (Moerman and van der Laan, 2022), we divided the accounting history literature into three distinct categories. While engagement with death as an empirical phenomenon in the accounting history literature is not new, in this Special Issue of Accounting History, we asked our contributors to problematise the ways in which accounts for, accounts of, and the business of death are mobilised in practice. Just as adopting economic perspectives drives research on financial valuation and behaviour, such as decision-making and financial accountability, we sought to interrogate how shifting the perspective to account for and accounts of the social phenomenon of death might elicit new insights.

The first category we labelled accounts of death to denote the transformation of death as a construct into something that could be statistically manipulated or to facilitate transactions. To this end, accounting historians have previously found financial records used as accounts of slavery, for example. However, for many accounting historians, the definition of what constitutes accounting is framed within a particular time period and context. Therefore, accounts or accounting evidence can be very different from traditional ledger systems and take a myriad of forms. For example, in this issue, Lippman and Grimmer (2026) have used an extensive data set including standardised inventory cards, photographs, shipping documents, auction records, and trial documents to provide a window into stolen art during the Nazi regime. Cimbrini et al. (2026), on the other hand, adopt Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital and habitus to compare the different political uses of death counts from the cholera epidemic in London and Naples in the nineteenth century.

Along with the growing acceptance that alternate forms of accounts and/or a single corpus of data as evidence of practice, further opportunities have emerged to understand historical accounting. For example, in this issue, both McCann (2026) and McBride (2026) adopt a narrative approach to examine single sources of contemporaneous data from non-accountants to understand the role of public accounts of death. While McCann (2026) found evidence of death or body counts used to bolster political rhetoric during the Vietnam War, McBride (2026) juxtaposed the public announcements of death via the new technology of the time, Bills of Mortality, with the reflections of a private citizen during the 1660s Plague in England.

The second category we labelled accounts for to describe the situation where death was more explicit in defining relations of power. We initially coined the portmanteau necroaccountability as a means to explore the ways in which accountability is manifest when the person or group with the right to demand an account is no longer living. This neologism is derived from the Greek nekros, meaning corpse, combined with accountability to overcome the limitations of calculative practices to fully disclose accounts of death. Thus, we offered necroaccountability to refer to the responsibility for the giving or making an account for death (Moerman and van der Laan, 2022: 15). Importantly, therefore, these accounts of death also describe the conditions of the living as they also inform us about relationships of power and inequalities. For example, accounts for death in instances of genocide and war, or the use and abuse of corpses (Funnell and Chwastiak, 2010; Lippman and Wilson, 2007; Moerman and van der Laan, 2025). And, while there has been some criticism of why we as a human society owe or are owed accountability to the dead, there is a tradition of engaging non-humans, such as the environment, or the not-yet-existent humans, such as being accountable to future generations in the form of sustainability accounting, in the literature. To further our understanding of necroaccountability, Lippman and Grimmer (2026) provide a compelling example of the restitution of stolen art by the Nazi regime to its original owners or their descendants as the repatriation of the loss of financial life. They draw on the original concept of necroaccountability to include biopolitical aspects of loss, such as financial death.

The third aspect consisted of studies in which death was an explicit business or implicit profit-making enterprise, whether through the commodification of its symbolic or technical value or the practice of necrocapitalism. Where profit is accumulated by dispossession or subsuming the rights of citizens, ‘death worlds’ are created as a business opportunity (Bannerjee, 2008: 1548). In this issue, the article by Twyford et al. (2026) pushes the boundaries of the technical business aspects of accounting to situate profiteering from the Nazi regime within the moral realm of necrocapitalism. Foucault's biopolitics and thanatopolitics are engaged to demonstrate how sovereign powers have the ultimate power to ‘make live’ or ‘let die’ in decisions for victimised groups by enrolling private profit in the murky politics of government. This also contributes to our understanding of necroaccountability by highlighting political exclusion as a form of death.

Introduction to the articles in the special issue

Lippman and Grimmer (2026) study the accounting records for looted art during the Nazi regime in Germany to explore the dual role of accounting as a tool of marginalisation and oppression and as well as an enabler of emancipatory practice. During the Nazi regime, a detailed accounting system was maintained for the art stolen from Jewish individuals and families. As other accounting historians have found, accounting as a technical/administrative endeavour distanced the bureaucrat from the horrors of the Holocaust and thus making both those victimised and their property invisible (see, e.g., Funnell, 1998; Twyford, 2021). However, by including other accounts, such as inventory cards and shipping records a more complete picture of oppression emerged, rendering the financial death suffered by the owners of the stolen art visible and was also ultimately enabling through tracing ownership to permit restitution to some of the original owners or their descendants.

Twyford et al. (2026) use the corporate context and Holocaust ‘business’ to ask questions about moral accountability, culpability and responsibility. In particular, they use the case of Degussa, a private business that profited from the Nazi regime through the development and supply of Zyklon B – the chemical repurposed to facilitate the mass extermination of Jews. To operationalise necroaccountability in the context of the Holocaust, the authors draw on thanatapolitics to understand the non-corporeal aspects of death such as financial and political death. Corporations traditionally have an arms-length relationship with death, however in this article, the necropolitics of the Holocaust are clearly demonstrated within the scope of moral corporate accountability.

Cimbrini et al. (2026) use Bourdieu to provide insights by using a comparison of the accounts of death in London and Naples during the cholera epidemic in 1854. At both sites, death counts provided the respective governments with the necessary data for control during exceptional or extraordinary circumstances. The ‘temporary field’ established by the cholera epidemic demonstrates the engagement of death counts at the medical/administrative nexus and how particular power relations manifest as necroaccountability. In England, for example, the medical fraternity was able to harness its symbolic capital to use death counts to understand the disease and inform the authorities about public health measures. In Naples, on the other hand, the medical experts were marginalised, and death counts were used merely as an administrative tool.

The article by McCann (2026) enhances our understanding of using death counts as a management tool in a military setting. During the Vietnam War (1955–1975), accounting for the hardware of military assets was soon replaced by accounting as the software of strategy and performance evaluation. Not dissimilar to other government techniques of control, ‘body counts’ became the transactional phenomena in which a narrative of ‘success’ and the maintenance of the belief that US involvement in the Vietnam conflict was an ethical intervention. The accounts portrayed both an aggressive and effective campaign that left little or no room for government accountability for military deaths in Vietnam in any meaningful sense.

McBride (2026) also addresses the role of government at a time when responsibility for public health was shifting from the Crown (via the Church) to the State. The study compares the use of public displays of quotidian death counts in the form of Bills of Mortality with the reflections of Samuel Pepys, a well-known diarist of the time. Pepys’ personal account of life and decision-making based on the Bills of Mortality to navigate life in London during the 1660s Plague is used as data. These two very different sources of information juxtapose both the collective and individual and the technical and the social aspects of accounts of the Plague. Counting is a ubiquitous human practice, and the large-scale collection of information from the Bills of Mortality was used by Pepys to identify patterns in the data and trends in the spread of the Plague. Bills of Mortality are recognised as a nascent form of epidemiological and population health statistics.

Concluding comments

The gradual secularisation of responsibility, combined with the application of calculative methods, has resulted in the standardisation of death and has profound implications for the governance of life. Through statistical applications, the science of population statistics has allowed an increasing politicisation through the use of ‘normal’ rates of death (Trabsky, 2022). However, as Troyer (2020: 1) argues, ‘dead bodies are completely normal – until suddenly they’re not’ and in this Special Issue, all articles have focused on accounting in relation to death during a period of exceptional circumstances. While accounting and death are situational practices and ‘our understanding of death, just as our understanding of accounting, is embedded in social structures, cultural norms, and political institutions’, why is it that death only becomes visible during a crisis or disaster (Moerman and van der Laan, 2022: 70)? We believe there are death statistics or accounts of death lurking in the background of everyday accounting such as actuarial calculations or cost/benefit analyses in routine operations and decisions such as in health care settings, where resources are inevitably scarce. Further research could pursue these themes as well as the myriad of other contexts where death and accounting meet in ordinary or everyday circumstances.