Describes the history of accounting and double-entry bookkeeping from Mesopotamia to the Renaissance to modern finance and explains how a system developed that could work across all trades and nations.
"A compelling, thought-provoking story about how financial innovation can influence culture, society, and the course of history. Luca Pacioli, from a small Italian hill town, was dazzled by Venice. In the fifteenth century the city was a vibrant center of trade with the Eastern world: gold, gems, embroidered cloth, and exotic spices flowed off the ships. The Venetian merchants had perfected a way of keeping their records that allowed them to measure their businesses' value for the first time. When Pacioli arrived in Venice to tutor a merchant's sons, he learned bookkeeping the Venetian way. Through his many travels--during which he befriended such luminaries as Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, and Piero della Francesca--Pacioli came into contact with the mathematics of ancient Greece and the Arabs. Bringing together his wide-ranging knowledge from Eastern and Western mathematical systems, he reformulated Venetian bookkeeping into an elegant accounting system that we still use today. As Jane Gleeson-White reveals, double-entry accounting was nothing short of revolutionary: fueling the Renaissance, enabling capitalism to flourish, and reshaping our global economy. In the 1930s, double-entry accounting was used to calculate the GDP of the United States for the New Deal, and John Maynard Keynes used double entry as the basis for calculating Britain's GDP during the Second World War. Yet double-entry accounting has its flaws: it cannot account for environmental and social costs, and it can be manipulated to hide losses. With the failures of Enron and Lehman Brothers and losses at J.P. Morgan Chase, it seems time for a new twenty-first-century accounting system. Filled with rich historical detail and fascinating characters, Double Entry takes us from the origins of accounting to the frontiers of finance in order to tell the remarkable story and legacy of double-entry bookkeeping"--Jacket.
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