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Title
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Accounting for agricultural development? The case of the Netherlands, 1840–1940
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Author
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Abstract
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| In the second half of the nineteenth century Dutch agronomists and government officials promoted bookkeeping as a means to raise agricultural productivity. However, most farmers were only interested in cash flow management for which they relied on their memory, unstructured private notebooks, accounts kept by their suppliers and, from the 1880s onwards, the accounts kept on their behalf by rural co-operatives. Farmers in the Netherlands only took to formal accounting when in 1914 the government extended the national income tax to all farmers earning 600 guilders or more. As farmers – and tax inspectors – struggled to estimate individual incomes, farmers' associations created accounting agencies to support the drafting of their tax returns. The success of these agencies shows that the fiscal imperative for bookkeeping was much stronger than the desire of farmers to raise farm productivity through more extensive accounting. |
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Language
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English
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Source (journal)
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Agricultural history review. - London
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Publication
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London
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2022
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ISSN
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0002-1490
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Volume/pages
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70
:1
(2022)
, p. 23-48
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