How did accounting, from simple bookkeeping to various complex models, from the initial accounting of economic activities to the further expansion and deepening of functions such as supervision, management, control, forecasting and decision-making, rule the world step by step in the financial history and political responsibility of nearly a thousand years?
Thoreau's masterpiece, Walden Lake Work Notes, uses accounting principles to reverse these tables and tries to calculate the minimum cost he needs for survival.
For leaders, whether in ancient Mesopotamia or based on the current situation, whether building bridges and roads or provoking disputes, they need to use financial and accounting information to understand the national economic situation and formulate various policies. Basic accounting tools such as double entry bookkeeping and auditing have laid the foundation of modern national system. However, so far, we know little about the constructive role of accounting in historical evolution, and we have paid a corresponding price for it.
Huang Renyu, a famous historian, used the concept of "digital management" to illustrate the important relationship between accounting system and modern commercial society: "If the society can accept absolute and supreme property rights, everything can be increased or decreased, and everything can be inherited, transferred and entrusted. Therefore, all aspects of material life, whether private or public, can be handled by numbers. The exchangeability of wealth is conducive to the accumulation of wealth and creates a dynamic environment. 」
In this elephant reading session, we will read the book and power recently published by CITIC Publishing Group. In this book, the historian Jacob Saul described a detailed accounting history for us. Through the changes of people's bookkeeping methods in history, we can see the emergence of a small double-entry bookkeeping method, which actually triggered a series of reactions and gave birth to important economic systems such as corporate system, joint-stock system, futures and auditing in modern western Europe.
As a work of economic and political history, Account Book and Power provides a valuable historical perspective for the study of current economic problems with rigorous investigation and contemporary application concepts, which inspires us to keep thinking. When you finish reading this book, there won't be such a simple understanding as "accounting = bookkeeping" in your mind. You will realize that as a technical force, it plays an inestimable role in today's increasingly complex international capital.