Using archival evidence relating to Albright & Wilson (A&W), this article challenges the validity of Chandler's view, based mainly on the study of secondary sources, that personal capitalism retarded the development of more advanced forms of managerial organisation in Britain in the late...

Research into the development of costing systems during the last 20 or so years has begun to challenge the previously widely held view that little by way of progress was made before the end of the nineteenth century. Much of this later research, however, did not include consideration of...

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...

Various estimates, both <italic>ex ante</italic> and <italic>ex post</italic>, have been produced of the accounting rate of return on investments in the late nineteenth-century coal industry, with some <italic>ex post</italic> figures also being calculated for individual firms engaged therein, such as the Consett Iron Co. Ltd. No one, however,...

This study examines aspects of the accounting and financial history of the South Manchuria Railway Company (SMR) from its formation in 1906. In particular we focus on the 1930s, a period in which the activities of the SMR became increasingly dominated by the demands of the Kwantung Army which...