Summing Accounts
Note how the intersection of rows and columns conveys an understanding of economic life as a series of discrete transactions between individual economic actors. Account books told a story about people meeting in the market, agreeing to prices, and trying to keep their assets and liabilities in balance. This imagery reflected the ideals of a society that hoped to keep business nested within the broader bounds of family, partnership, and community.
In reality, account books did little to explain the origins or the meaning of global events, from bank runs to crop failures, that intruded with increasing frequency in the nineteenth-century economy. Yet even in such periods of tumult, the promise of stability through balanced bookkeeping led some individuals to feel personally responsible for their failure. Warnings abounded in business manuals and prescriptive literature about the perils of failing to keep good accounts.