Accounting historiography: looking back to the future

This paper aims to contextualise and critically evaluate the state of accounting historiography, its past and future agenda as a foundation for future scholars’ design and pursuit of accounting history research.

Focussing on the historiographic accounting history literature, the paper draws on prior state-of-the-art reviews as well as a range of contemporary accounting history research studies to provide an overview of the accounting history community internationally, its emergence, institutions, theories and methodologies.

Accounting history researchers are identified now as an established and growing international community of scholars, increasingly diverse in national origins and focus, yet still on the threshold of moving beyond its specialist literature into general accounting and history research literatures. Nonetheless, their historiography exhibits a vibrant theoretical and methodological discourse that has laid the foundations for expanding opportunities in both research subjects and approaches available for study.

Theoretical and methodological proliferation offers a wealth of options for further research in this field, in terms of subject matter focus and in terms of innovative and insightful approaches to their investigation.

Findings already available in the accounting history literature offer useful foundational understandings that have the potential to better inform contemporary policy and practice decision-makers.

The paper provides a reference point for emerging and established scholars in accounting history, presenting a summary of their underlying historical institutional and historiographic development contexts and offering a research agenda based on theoretical and methodological diversity.