Sin, Confession, and the Arts of Book- and Cord-Keeping: An Intercontinental and Transcultural Exploration of Accounting and Governmentality

Abstract

My objective is to examine an intriguing and heretofore unrecognized convergence in the history of bookkeeping. The story revolves around an extraordinary parallelism in the evolution of bookkeeping and the philosophical and ethical principles underlying the practice of accounting between southern Europe and Andean South America during the two centuries or so prior to the Spanish invasion of the Inka Empire in 1532. The event of the European invasion of the Andes brought these two similar yet distinct trans-Atlantic traditions of “bookkeeping” and accounting into violent confrontation.