Double Entry
How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance
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3.3 • 18 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Lively history. . . . Show[s] double entry’s role in the creation of the accounting profession, and even of capitalism itself.”—The New Yorker
Filled with colorful characters and history, Double Entry takes us from the ancient origins of accounting in Mesopotamia to the frontiers of modern finance. At the heart of the story is double-entry bookkeeping: the first system that allowed merchants to actually measure the worth of their businesses. Luca Pacioli—monk, mathematician, alchemist, and friend of Leonardo da Vinci—incorporated Arabic mathematics to formulate a system that could work across all trades and nations. As Jane Gleeson-White reveals, double-entry accounting was nothing short of revolutionary: it fueled the Renaissance, enabled capitalism to flourish, and created the global economy. John Maynard Keynes would use it to calculate GDP, the measure of a nation’s wealth. Yet double-entry accounting has had its failures. With the costs of sudden corporate collapses such as Enron and Lehman Brothers, and its disregard of environmental and human costs, the time may have come to re-create it for the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gleeson-White offers a lively and elegantly written account of the history of double-entry bookkeeping. Though the topic hardly sounds intriguing, the author makes ledgers and numbers come alive. As she writes: "Our urge to account to measure and record our wealth is one of the oldest human impulses." Gleeson-White, who holds degrees in economics and accounting, describes in vibrant and engaging prose how early writing systems were shaped by clay counting tokens, and how the development of the double-entry system, derived from Arabic mathematics, revolutionized commerce and capitalism in Renaissance Italy and contributed to the development of today's global economy. In a spellbinding historical narrative, the author traces the system from Luca Pacioli's pioneering accounting treatise, "Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportione et proportionalit ," to the Industrial Revolution, when the profession of "chartered accountant" was established. Moving into modern times, Gleeson-White details how shortcomings in the system and "gaping holes in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act" and other regulations that contributed to recent corporate collapses, such as Enron and WorldCom.This dynamic examination of the impact and legacy of double-entry bookkeeping is sure to appeal to those in the accounting profession, business leaders, and history buffs, and will likely become required reading in business school curricula.
Customer Reviews
Why
Why do we go from the history of accounting to global warming?
Intriguing, but cursory
I was left wanting more, much more. This seems like a compelling enough story, but lacked much of the detail that I would have expected from a history double entry bookkeeping.
For example: what were the points of controversy and confusion as it evolved, what were the steps of its evolution, what were the problems that spurred the evolution, etc..
In contrast, this book treats it as more of a Platonic artifact that dropped from the heavens providing THE solution. (Until it gets to the Enron/Worldcom part, at which point "heavens" seems like an unlikely source).
It simply tries to cover too much in a book that is too brief.