On the history of the creation of accounting textbooks: Late 19th — early 20th century

Abstract

The article deals with issues related to creating accounting textbooks the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when mass business education began to develop in Russia. The evolution of ideas about the textbook, the requirements for textbooks, the evaluation of textbooks by reviews, the role of competitions in stimulating authors, the problem of selecting the qualitative textbook and attempts to solve it by administrative and market means, and, finally, the image of a modern accounting textbook as seen more than a century ago are examined. The article is based on a critical analysis of sources little or never used in previous studies, including textbooks, journal articles, materials from congresses of Russian leaders on technical and vocational education, and other representative meetings. The study shows that the historical context not only reveals the problems relevant to modern business education, but also provides an opportunity to learn about different approaches to solving them. The study suggests using historical experience to examine how effective administrative decisions about recommending educational literature have been. The study demonstrates that past experience can be used, for example, in organizing authors competitions. In retrospect, the debates about the permissibility of publishing reviews of textbooks are also of interest. The study proves that the concept of an accounting textbook proposed at the beginning of the 20th century hasn’t lost its relevance in terms of the abundance and scope of innovations and can be claimed by modern accounting science and methodological practice.