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...

This article looks at the effects of office mechanisation in greater detail by describing data processing innovations in major building societies during the dawn of the computer era. Reference to similar developments in clearing banks, industrial and computer organisations provides evidence as...

Through a detailed examination, using business archives, of the impact of the First World War on cost calculation practices in British firms, this paper examines, and finds wanting, the claim of Loft (1986, 1990) that cost accounting came into the light in Britain during the First World War.

Many generalizations have been made regarding the introduction within British businesses of the costing/accounting techniques associated with the scientific management movement during the early decades of the twentieth century, but little detail is known of the process and extent of their...

Georgina Ferry (2003) A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Teashops and the World's First Office Computer, London: Fourth Estate, pp. xii + 221. £15.99 (hbk), ISBN 1841-15185-8.

During the first sixty years or so of the twentieth century, a number of accounting techniques were developed for use in the management of business. One of those new techniques was budgetary control. This paper examines the dissemination and diffusion of budgetary control in France and Britain...