Since China's ‘reform and opening up' policy began in 1978 there has been increasing interest in how Chinese business activity was organised during the era before the imposition of central planning under Chairman Mao. Some business archives from that era have now been discovered and examined...

Goody (1996: The East in the West) contests the arguments of Weber and others that Western accounting developments — and in particular double-entry bookkeeping ('DEB') which first appeared in Italy around the end of the 13th century AD — provided a new calculative rationality that drove the...