A business education for ‘the middling sort of people’ in mercantilist Britain

John Richard Edwards

The British Accounting Review, 2009, vol. 41, issue 4, 240-255

Abstract: The early modern period (1500–1800) saw England transformed from a relatively insignificant European nation into one of the world's leading economies. As the rate of economic change accelerated, the latter part of this era witnessed significant innovation in educational provision designed to meet the needs of a rapidly changing business and occupational landscape. The continued focus of grammar schools and universities on the supply of clerics and scholars ignored the growing administrative and managerial requirements of increasingly complex organisational entities located within the commercial and non-profit making sectors. Against a background of improved literacy, this paper reveals the creation of private schools and academies to satisfy new educational requirements, and that these institutions did so by devising a unified commercial education based on the inter-relationship between writing, arithmetic and double entry bookkeeping.

Keywords: Accounting history; Business education; Writing master (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890838909000638
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:bracre:v:41:y:2009:i:4:p:240-255

DOI: 10.1016/j.bar.2009.10.004

Access Statistics for this article

The British Accounting Review is currently edited by Nathan Lael Joseph and Alan Lowe

More articles in The British Accounting Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().