Archival research and the lost worlds of accounting

Abstract

Developments in History Proper have by-passed accounting history. While sometimes open to occasional alarm calls such as this, mainstream history has carried-on regardless behind a defunct methodological shield. Historians have complacently paraded “interesting” data and evidence without consideration of its validity or relevance. Philosophical concerns have been methodically barred from consideration. Despite the Kuhnian Revolution, archival antiquarianism reigns supreme. This regimen survives in a North-Korean-like insularity, by combining a self-referential closure using Great Men of accounting with a refusal to engage a broader literature in social history. This paper redresses the balance in two ways: First, by using Kuhn’s critique to show archivalist empiricism as incapable of proving a paradigm’s truth, and revealing how easily the latter may succumb to popularist euphoria and ideologies. Second, by sketching a Post-Kuhnian panorama in terms of a Non-Eurocentric, social, gendered, environmental, public interest and labour orientation. Ignoring such possibilities condemns accounting history to more soldiering under impoverished Archivalism.

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