For a very long time, the areas available for continuous long-distance trade were limited to territories the size of Braudel's Mediterranée (1949). Whatever the commercial organizations (merchants in the Roman or the Fatimid Empires, the Hanseatic League, the Florentine Companies), their trade...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the emergence of auditing in a sixteenth century business organization and to link these developments to the evolution of the organizational structure and accounting. More specifically, the paper introduces into the debate material, which documents the...

The overall purpose of this thesis is to understand how and why networks played a significant role for the merchants and company traders of the Danish Asiatic Company (DAC) in their trade in China. To explore this, the following research questions will be answered:  From the perspective of...

In the eighteenth century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) traded sappanwood, a source of red dye for textiles, in both its Dutch-Asiatic and intra-Asian trade routes. The voyage and cargo records kept by the VOC's bookkeeper-general in Batavia reveal a small but convenient trade that...

This article analyses the eighteenth-century accounting practices of the Japanese trading station or factory of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie or VOC). The factory's trade and its reported profits declined during the eighteenth century, but because of the...