We explain the history of accounting, its relationship with mathematics and politics. Also, modern accounting.
What is the history of accounting?
The accounting is a discipline in charge of measuring and analyzing the financial and patrimonial situation of an individual, a nation or one organization determined, whether from the public or private sphere, in order to provide relevant information for management and decision-making tasks.
It is a technical discipline, to which accountants or accounting professionals are currently engaged, professions that only exist from the 19th century to the present day, despite the fact that accounting has a thousand-year history. This is because the need to account for goods, that is, to keep a record of them for a better economic organization, is as old as the humanity.
In fact, it is thought to be one of the reasons for the invention of the writing, which just took its first steps in Mesopotamia, Egypt and other geographies as a method of representing goods, livestock or people, through signs or drawings of the same. There are still lists of expenses, goods received and sold, and other similar documents that are around 7,000 years old.
Furthermore, the rise of the great empires The former represented an accumulation of economic, productive, tax and commercial information that undoubtedly represented a challenge for administrators, given their volume of transactions. That is why he demanded the work of accountants of some kind, to keep a record of what is there, what is owed, what is negotiated, what is achieved, what is collected in taxes, and so on.
The Roman empireFor example, he was known for his handling of financial information, but he was by no means the first to do so. The ancient Persians, the Phoenicians, the Assyrians, and the Sumerians already had a relative practice of accounting.
On the other hand, the first texts on the art of accounting arose in cultures in which the math It was invented. During the Mauryan Empire (320-185 BC) of India, for example, the Brahmin and writer Chanakya (c. 350-283 BC) wrote his work Arthashasthra, in which he explains in detail how to keep the accounting books of a sovereign State.
Something similar was developed in the time of the Roman Emperor Augustus (63 BC-AD 14), who listed and quantified the public spending of the empire, as evidenced in the Res Gestae Divi Augusti ("The exploits of the divine Augustus"). There, a record was kept of grants, costs to war veterans, offerings, temple constructions, and so on. That is just one example of the many accounting documents that survive from Ancient Rome.
Later, accounting gained importance in Europe medieval when in the thirteenth century a monetary economy began. In fact, at that time the double entry method was introduced, which records a debit entry for each transaction (from the Latin I will debit, "Debt") and another in credit (from Latin credere, "Believe" or "trust").
The pioneers in the use of this methodology were the Jewish bankers of the Middle East, although they soon moved to Renaissance Italy, seat of the bourgeoisie commercial, and the first book that collects this accounting method is the Ledger of Farolfi (1299-1300), of the Giovanno Farolfy & Company, a Florentine company based in Nimes, France.
Two other important books for the standardization of accounting at that time were:
- The treaty Della mercatura e del mercante perfetto ("On the merchandise and the perfect merchant") by Benedetto Cotrugli (1416-1469), Italian merchant and economist, published in 1573 for the first time in Venice.
- Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalità (“Revision of Arithmetic, Geometry, Proportions and Proportionality”) by the Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli (c. 1445-1517), which appeared in 1494 and soon became a reference book for merchants of the time.
The arrival of the modernity and of capitalist thought brought an even greater need for professional accounting. For example, from 1600 the rise of societies by Actions It required new accounting information systems, which led to their division into two aspects: accounting for internal purposes (for administration), and accounting for external purposes (for financial purposes).
But modern accounting, as it is understood today, is a product of the professionalization of the trade in the 19th century, especially in Scotland, where it managed to separate itself from the legal profession. Thus, in 1854, the Glasgow Institute of Accountants petitioned Queen Victoria for a Royal Charter, requesting the formalization of the accounting profession as one of tradition and respect, whose professionals came to be considered "public accountants."
Shortly after, the first colleges for chartered accountants emerged in Wales and England in the late 19th century. Being London the financial center of the world during the Industrial RevolutionBritish accounting considerations soon became international norm and echoed in other nations. In the United States, for example, the first American Institute of Certified Public Accountants was established in 1887.