Archival research and the lost worlds of accounting

Developments in History Proper have by-passed accounting history. While sometimes open to occasional alarm calls such as this, mainstream history has carried-on regardless behind a defunct methodological shield. Historians have complacently paraded “interesting ” data and evidence without consideration of its validity or relevance. Philosophical concerns have been methodically barred from consideration. Despite the Kuhnian Revolution, archival antiquarianism reigns supreme. This regimen survives in a North-Korean-like insularity, by combining a self-referential closure using Great Men of accounting with a refusal to engage a broader literature in social history. This paper redresses the balance in two ways: First, by using Kuhn’s critique to show archivalist empiricism as incapable of proving a paradigm’s truth, and revealing how easily the latter may succumb to popularist euphoria and ideologies. Second, by sketching a Post-Kuhnian panorama in terms of a Non-Eurocentric, social, gendered, environmental, public interest and labour orientation. Ignoring such possibilities condemns accounting history to more soldiering under impoverished Archivalism