Purpose – There are two main alternative explanations in the literature for the patterns of financial reporting during the period of the British Industrial Revolution (BIR). Rob Bryer sees the new social relations of production in which manufacturing entrepreneurs strove to increase the...

The patterns of change in the financial reporting practices of the early railway companies, and their causes, are important aspects of the evolution of accounting practice more generally. They have accordingly been widely discussed in the literature, although the views expressed have rarely been...

Purpose – Changes in financial reporting information were an important part of the British transition from feudalism to capitalism, with statements showing cash surpluses or deficits being gradually superseded by income statements and balance sheets. The existing literature does not...

Dividends can provide a tangible signal of earnings, but this function depends upon characteristics of financial reporting that were not always present in early financial capitalism. Although eighteenth-century English canal companies offered low‐risk securitized capital approved by Parliament...

<title/> The three UK rolling stock companies (ROSCOs) are a product of the privatization of the railway industry in the 1990s. As the UK approaches the 25th anniversary of the first privatization of a state-owned industry (telecommunications), this article evaluates the background and the structure of...

A significant aspect of the privatization of the British railway industry was that the provision of passenger train services would be awarded on a competitively tendered franchise basis. The turbulence in the ownership of the East Coast Main Line (ECML) franchise is testimony to the inherent and...

George Hudson was the most important railway promoter of his time. He had a particular aptitude for visualizing and arranging spectacular company and line amalgamations and his activities helped to bring about the beginnings of a more modern railway network. In 1849 he exercised effective...

Reflection on learning (both on content and process), and on the knowledge resulting from that learning, provides many benefits. The chief of these, in the context of thinking about, and within, accounting as practice and academic discipline, is that reflection can help us to turn experience...