Alan Sangster
Biographic Data
| ID | 1115258 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alan Sangster |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alan |
| FAMILY NAME | Sangster |
| SIGNATURE | SANGSTER A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Aberdeen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9173-9702 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Sedentary Merchants, Agents, and Double Entry Accounting
Few would disagree that the English language accounting history literature on double entry accounting before 1800 is descriptive, uncritical, partial, and lacks explanations for the practices adopted by its users. During much of that period, double entry was not used to produce financial statements. Profit was rarely calculated, never accurately. The dominant view in this literature was expressed several times by economist and accounting historia…
The Diffusion of Double Entry Bookkeeping before 1800—Establishing a New Research Agenda
This paper adopts a traditional critical-historical research methodology focusing on context and function to investigate and explain the factors that led to widespread adoption and diffusion of double entry bookkeeping within and beyond its Italian roots before 1800. It finds double entry facilitated use of credit in the face of shortage of coinage. Its use spread among moneychanger-bankers at regional fairs across northern Italy, and from there …
Digital Accounting History—Adoption of a Digitalized Historical Research Methodology
This paper presents details and examples of use of a digitalized research methodology adopted to investigate a mid-15th century Venetian double entry ledger. A digitized journal of the ledger was created, populated using the data entered in the ledger, particularly the contra account references recorded in each entry. This enabled missing entries to be generated and accounts only partially surviving, even missing entirely, to be recreated. The di…
The emergence of double entry bookkeeping
Double entry account books of medieval Italian merchants and bankers have been extensively used as primary sources by historians of several disciplines interested in business, trade, commodities, markets, sources, prices, interest rates, exchange rates, tariffs, taxes, wages, rents, agents, networks, and many other related topics. The reason for the emergence of such a detailed bookkeeping method is unknown. This paper presents a critical analysi…
Unethical Peer Review
This paper calls for greater ethical standards in the peer review process. Critical analysis through the lens of the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers is performed on two reviews received on different versions of a paper from two different journals. Both are relentlessly negative. Neither is executed ethically. No justifiable significant criticism is evident. Both appear influenced by confirmation bias. One is characterized by apparent m…
The Business Needs that Drove the Emergence of Double Entry
Being able to understand how double entry bookkeeping works is a critically important skill for an accountant, but few accounting graduates understand or perform double entry at the level desired. It has always been taught using rules, never by principles. This paper responds to and rejects criticisms published in this journal by Richard Macve. They concern a paper I published in 2018 presenting Luca Pacioli's approach to teaching double entry us…
The Life and Works of Luca Pacioli (1446/7–1517), Humanist Educator
Accounting has few heroes, but one that most acknowledge as worthy of that accolade is Luca Pacioli, the man who published the first printed exposition of double entry bookkeeping in 1494. This was the publication that led to the development of the accounting systems we use today. However, if we consider our literature on Pacioli, it is found to be not just confusing and contradictory, but undecided as to who he was and what he did, or did not do…
Basil Yamey (1919–2020)
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Alan Sangster; Basil Yamey (1919–2020): A Reflection on His Contribution to Accounting History. Accounting Historians Journal 1 June 2021; 48 (1): 67–70. doi: https://doi.org/10.2308/AAHJ-2020-024 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manage…
Pacioli's Lens
This paper investigates why, in 1494, the Franciscan friar and teacher of mathematics, Luca Pacioli, published an instructional treatise describing the system of double entry bookkeeping. In doing so, it also explores the rhetoric and foundations of double entry through the lens of Pacioli's treatise. Recent findings on Pacioli's life and works, his writings, and the medieval accounting archives are combined to identify how he was inspired by his…
Strategic manoeuvres and impression management
This historical study examines the actions of the Australian former asbestos company, James Hardie, when faced with a potentially ruinous corporate scandal between 2001 and 2007. The company became vilified as public awareness grew of the damage to public health its use of asbestos had caused. In response, it set-up a knowingly underfunded compensation fund supported by a strategy of misinformation and denial. Its actions are analysed using Olive…
Locating the Source of Pacioli's Bookkeeping Treatise
There is much we do not know about the early development of double entry bookkeeping. What, for example, caused it to be used by sufficient merchants for it to be formally taught to their sons in Northern Italy before anyone had apparently written anything about it? And, what did Pacioli use as the source for his 1494 treatise, the earliest known detailed written description of the method, something that has challenged researchers for at least th…
Public–private partnerships’
This paper proposes that we can learn from past experience how specific contexts can explain specific public–private interfaces and the corporate governance rules ascribed to them, and so inform debate about modern ventures of this type. To this end, the paper explores the ‘public–private partnership’ of the Portuguese Companhia Geral de Comércio de Pernambuco e Paraíba (CGPP – General Company of Pernambuco and Paraíba) founded in 1759 by the Pom…
In Defense of Pacioli
This paper responds to Basil Yamey's paper in the December 2010 issue of this journal. In that paper, Professor Yamey contradicts some of the points made in our 2008 paper, also in this journal, in which we conclude that Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita (1494) was written primarily for merchants and their sons. He does so by attempting to explain why Pacioli's exposition of double-entry bookkeeping, De Com…
Luca Pacioli
Luca Pacioli, was a Franciscan friar born in Borgo San Sepolcro in what is now Northern Italy in 1446 or 1447. It is believed that he died in the same town on 19 June 1517. He is best remembered for his 615-page mathematical compendium, Summa de Arithmetica Geometria Proportioni et Proportionalità, published in 1494; and for his friendship with Leonardo da Vinci. Many accountants perceive his greatest contribution as being the 27-page treatise on…
In Defense of Pacioli
This paper responds to Basil Yamey's paper in the December 2010 issue of this journal. In that paper, Professor Yamey contradicts some of the points made in our 2008 paper, also in this journal, in which we conclude that Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita (1494) was written primarily for merchants and their sons. He does so by attempting to explain why Pacioli's exposition of double-entry bookkeeping, De Com…
Locating the Source of Pacioli's Bookkeeping Treatise
There is much we do not know about the early development of double entry bookkeeping. What, for example, caused it to be used by sufficient merchants for it to be formally taught to their sons in Northern Italy before anyone had apparently written anything about it? And, what did Pacioli use as the source for his 1494 treatise, the earliest known detailed written description of the method, something that has challenged researchers for at least th…
Public–private partnerships’
This paper proposes that we can learn from past experience how specific contexts can explain specific public–private interfaces and the corporate governance rules ascribed to them, and so inform debate about modern ventures of this type. To this end, the paper explores the ‘public–private partnership’ of the Portuguese Companhia Geral de Comércio de Pernambuco e Paraíba (CGPP – General Company of Pernambuco and Paraíba) founded in 1759 by the Pom…
Strategic manoeuvres and impression management
This historical study examines the actions of the Australian former asbestos company, James Hardie, when faced with a potentially ruinous corporate scandal between 2001 and 2007. The company became vilified as public awareness grew of the damage to public health its use of asbestos had caused. In response, it set-up a knowingly underfunded compensation fund supported by a strategy of misinformation and denial. Its actions are analysed using Olive…
Luca Pacioli
Luca Pacioli, was a Franciscan friar born in Borgo San Sepolcro in what is now Northern Italy in 1446 or 1447. It is believed that he died in the same town on 19 June 1517. He is best remembered for his 615-page mathematical compendium, Summa de Arithmetica Geometria Proportioni et Proportionalità, published in 1494; and for his friendship with Leonardo da Vinci. Many accountants perceive his greatest contribution as being the 27-page treatise on…
In Defense of Pacioli
This paper responds to Basil Yamey's paper in the December 2010 issue of this journal. In that paper, Professor Yamey contradicts some of the points made in our 2008 paper, also in this journal, in which we conclude that Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita (1494) was written primarily for merchants and their sons. He does so by attempting to explain why Pacioli's exposition of double-entry bookkeeping, De Com…
Locating the Source of Pacioli's Bookkeeping Treatise
There is much we do not know about the early development of double entry bookkeeping. What, for example, caused it to be used by sufficient merchants for it to be formally taught to their sons in Northern Italy before anyone had apparently written anything about it? And, what did Pacioli use as the source for his 1494 treatise, the earliest known detailed written description of the method, something that has challenged researchers for at least th…
Public–private partnerships’
This paper proposes that we can learn from past experience how specific contexts can explain specific public–private interfaces and the corporate governance rules ascribed to them, and so inform debate about modern ventures of this type. To this end, the paper explores the ‘public–private partnership’ of the Portuguese Companhia Geral de Comércio de Pernambuco e Paraíba (CGPP – General Company of Pernambuco and Paraíba) founded in 1759 by the Pom…
Strategic manoeuvres and impression management
This historical study examines the actions of the Australian former asbestos company, James Hardie, when faced with a potentially ruinous corporate scandal between 2001 and 2007. The company became vilified as public awareness grew of the damage to public health its use of asbestos had caused. In response, it set-up a knowingly underfunded compensation fund supported by a strategy of misinformation and denial. Its actions are analysed using Olive…
Pacioli's Lens
This paper investigates why, in 1494, the Franciscan friar and teacher of mathematics, Luca Pacioli, published an instructional treatise describing the system of double entry bookkeeping. In doing so, it also explores the rhetoric and foundations of double entry through the lens of Pacioli's treatise. Recent findings on Pacioli's life and works, his writings, and the medieval accounting archives are combined to identify how he was inspired by his…
The Life and Works of Luca Pacioli (1446/7–1517), Humanist Educator
Accounting has few heroes, but one that most acknowledge as worthy of that accolade is Luca Pacioli, the man who published the first printed exposition of double entry bookkeeping in 1494. This was the publication that led to the development of the accounting systems we use today. However, if we consider our literature on Pacioli, it is found to be not just confusing and contradictory, but undecided as to who he was and what he did, or did not do…
Basil Yamey (1919–2020)
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Alan Sangster; Basil Yamey (1919–2020): A Reflection on His Contribution to Accounting History. Accounting Historians Journal 1 June 2021; 48 (1): 67–70. doi: https://doi.org/10.2308/AAHJ-2020-024 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manage…
The Business Needs that Drove the Emergence of Double Entry
Being able to understand how double entry bookkeeping works is a critically important skill for an accountant, but few accounting graduates understand or perform double entry at the level desired. It has always been taught using rules, never by principles. This paper responds to and rejects criticisms published in this journal by Richard Macve. They concern a paper I published in 2018 presenting Luca Pacioli's approach to teaching double entry us…
Unethical Peer Review
This paper calls for greater ethical standards in the peer review process. Critical analysis through the lens of the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers is performed on two reviews received on different versions of a paper from two different journals. Both are relentlessly negative. Neither is executed ethically. No justifiable significant criticism is evident. Both appear influenced by confirmation bias. One is characterized by apparent m…
The Diffusion of Double Entry Bookkeeping before 1800—Establishing a New Research Agenda
This paper adopts a traditional critical-historical research methodology focusing on context and function to investigate and explain the factors that led to widespread adoption and diffusion of double entry bookkeeping within and beyond its Italian roots before 1800. It finds double entry facilitated use of credit in the face of shortage of coinage. Its use spread among moneychanger-bankers at regional fairs across northern Italy, and from there …
Digital Accounting History—Adoption of a Digitalized Historical Research Methodology
This paper presents details and examples of use of a digitalized research methodology adopted to investigate a mid-15th century Venetian double entry ledger. A digitized journal of the ledger was created, populated using the data entered in the ledger, particularly the contra account references recorded in each entry. This enabled missing entries to be generated and accounts only partially surviving, even missing entirely, to be recreated. The di…
The emergence of double entry bookkeeping
Double entry account books of medieval Italian merchants and bankers have been extensively used as primary sources by historians of several disciplines interested in business, trade, commodities, markets, sources, prices, interest rates, exchange rates, tariffs, taxes, wages, rents, agents, networks, and many other related topics. The reason for the emergence of such a detailed bookkeeping method is unknown. This paper presents a critical analysi…
Sedentary Merchants, Agents, and Double Entry Accounting
Few would disagree that the English language accounting history literature on double entry accounting before 1800 is descriptive, uncritical, partial, and lacks explanations for the practices adopted by its users. During much of that period, double entry was not used to produce financial statements. Profit was rarely calculated, never accurately. The dominant view in this literature was expressed several times by economist and accounting historia…
Accounting (8 works) · Bookkeeping (8 works) · History (7 works) · Accounting (6 works) · Economics (6 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Accounting and Organizational Management (5 works) · Business (5 works) · Classics (5 works)