General social theory provides a framework within which accounting and its role in advancing business and society can be examined, including historical development and functions. This study examines the advent of accounting in business governance, from ancient origins to present day, from the...

In 1720, Britain and France convulsed in the South Sea and Mississippi bubbles. Manias and crashes have stalked financial markets ever since, demonstrating the profound difficulty of preventing or mitigating them. Conventional narratives depict the crises as the product of hubris, folly, and...

The evolution of history as an academic discipline began in the 19th century. The role of the German historians in making the discipline cannot be underestimated as Leopold von Ranke is deemed the ‘father of history’. The impeccable role of the father of Sociology, Auguste Comte can also not...

Lauchlin Currie and Albert O. Hirschman worked together as advisers to the National Planning Council in Colombia in the 1950's. Both had little experience in development economics when they arrived, and did not see eye to eye about the functioning and policy recommendations of the Council....

This article seeks to demonstrate that the invention of double-entry accounting, during the 13th and 14th centuries in the cities of northern Italy, was at the origin of the emergence of our monetary system: the credit money system. By showing the limits of the monetary histories that currently...

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman policy-makers adopted a more liberal attitude towards price formation. This was accompanied by the fiscal and administrative centralization of the grain trade. These seemingly contradictory policy changes could, in part, be explained...

This chapter surveys the classificatory approaches of business cycles and crises theories found in dictionary articles. These are found to belong to a surprisingly small number of types. At first, dictionary writers only cited the theories they wanted to disprove. Then (especially in Germany in...