Functions of accounting, types of rulership (-archies) and forms of rule (-[o]cracies)

This critical history is concerned with accountings as technologies of domination and of legitimation. Widespread studies of accounting usages and their contexts have illuminated these socio-political functions of accounting. Many of these studies are set in governmental contexts, where budgets, budgetary accounting and budgetary reporting have attained special significance in matters of imposing and appropriating taxes. The present study is set in this context but is distinguishable in several respects. The author genealogizes the accounting presently associated with a sovereign state described variously as a parliamentary democracy, constitutional (or limited) monarchy and commonwealth realm; and which has led a recent worldwide neo-liberal trend away from bureaucracy towards managocracy. Furthermore, the direct ancestors of this accounting are discernible over at least one millennium – so making the study truly longitudinal – and were used under several other -archies and -[o]cracies. Indeed, mostly, these ancestors were used in a distant geographical context, and some were a technology of the colonialism that precipitated the present sovereign state. That colonialism gave way to neo-imperialism, perpetrated by a settler élite in conjunction with external parties able to exercise significant power from a distance, assisted by accounting. There are still elements of neo-imperialism today, some of it reinforced by accounting as a technology of globalisation. The study is predicated on the inadequacies of history being relevant to understanding the present and contemplating the future, which will include the choice between the accession of the next hereditary monarch or the establishment of a republic