Double Entry How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance

by Gleeson-White, Jane

• ISBN13: 9780393088960
• ISBN10: 0393088960
• Edition: 00
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-10-01
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

Filled with colorful characters and history, Double Entry takes us from the ancient origins of accounting in Mesopotamia to the frontiers of modern finance. At the heart of the story is double-entry bookkeeping: the first system that allowed merchants to actually measure the worth of their businesses. Luca Pacioli-monk, mathematician, alchemist, and friend of Leonardo da Vinci-incorporated Arabic mathematics to formulate a system that could work across all trades and nations. As Jane Gleeson-White reveals, double-entry accounting was nothing short of revolutionary: it fueled the Renaissance, enabled capitalism to flourish, and created the global economy. John Maynard Keynes would use it to calculate GDP, the measure of a nation's wealth. Yet double-entry accounting has had its failures. With the costs of sudden corporate collapses such as Enron and Lehman Brothers, and its disregard of environmental and human costs, the time may have come to re-create it for the future.

Table of Contents

Preface: Bobby Kennedy and the wealth of nations and corporations	p. 1
Accounting: our first communications technology	p. 10
Merchants and mathematics	p. 29
Luca Parioli: from Sansepolcro to celebrity	p. 49
Pacioli's landmark bookkeeping treatise of 1494	p. 91
Venetian double entry goes viral	p. 115
Double entry morphs: the industrial revolution and the birth of a profession	p. 132
Double entry and capitalism-chicken and egg?	p. 161
John Maynard Keynes, double entry and the wealth of nations	p. 176
The rise and scandalous rise of a profession	p. 194
Gross Domestic Product and how accounting could make or break the planet	p. 226
Epilogue	p. 250
Acknowledgements	p. 255
Notes	p. 257
Bibliography	p. 271
Index	p. 283
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