LAUSR

This edition of ‘Routledge New Works in Accounting History’ is a very interesting study of accounting practices in a very particular context, the Netherlands from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. It will be of much interest to accounting and business historians as well as scholars in other fields and to individuals who are curious about how life was in the past and, more specifically, about how a country faced complicated and unfavourable natural environmental conditions and became an international commercial player. The authors’ main objective is to examine the contributions of accounting to the success of the Dutch East-India Company (Vereenidge Oost-Indishe Compagnie, also known as VOC) and the influences to which accounting practices were submitted. From the beginning the authors make it clear that the financial accounting of the East-India Company changed little during its lifetime (1602–1799) and that financial accounting information ‘was not designed as an aid to rational investment decision-making by communicating the Company’s financial performance but to be a means of promoting sound stewardship by senior management’ (p. i). So, more than the success of the Company reflecting the use of a particular bookkeeping system, the authors argue that