This study of the interrelations of accounting and the State portrays accounting as a technology of government to effectively enact 'practical action' [Snook, S. A. (2000) <italic>Friendly Fire: The Accidental Shootdown of U.S. Black Hawks over Northern Iraq</italic> (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press)]...

This paper sets out to examine the development, in Britain and France prior to 1880, of industrial accounting, defined for the purposes of this paper as the practice of cost calculation within an accounting system based on double entry bookkeeping. Similarities and differences between the two...