Edinburgh accountants in public practice pre-collective organisation: 1757–1834

ABSTRACT This study is intended to increase knowledge and improve understanding of early public accountancy professionalisation in Scotland by applying the prosopographical research method to a community of practitioners in the capital city of Edinburgh in the early-nineteenth century. Using archival data, the study identifies the collective professional and social characteristics of 124 Edinburgh practitioners in 1834 by means of career-related analyses of their origin, education, training, and service-related signals of movement to occupational ascendency prior to the community’s later collective organisation. The study makes visible a structured and mature community operating in several occupational jurisdictions involving multi-disciplinary knowledge; maintaining a subordinate but mutually-dependent relationship with the legal profession; having a primary role in emerging insurance services; and achieving individual practitioner status recognition in a class-conscious city. Evidence of signals of movement to occupational ascendency adds to existing knowledge and understanding of the pre-collective organisation phase of public accountancy professionalisation in Scotland.