Download Free Accounting History And The Rise Of Civilization Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Accounting History And The Rise Of Civilization and write the review.

Volume 1 of Accounting History covers the first 10,000 plus years of the rise of accounting and civilization. Conveniently, accounting was part of the developing culture from the start. With fortified villages, accumulating wealth meant inventory accounting, first using tokens (clay balls) and eventually writing plus the abstract concepts of numbers. Cultures evolved in Mesopotamia and elsewhere. After the Crusades, Italian city-states created merchant wealth based on the creation of double-entry. Luca Pacioli’s Summa described the Venetian system, which traveled north thanks to Gutenberg’s printing press. Enhanced forms of manufacturing, banking, and merchant trade continued. England proved to be a special place, where the Industrial Revolution was born. Along the way, accounting sophistication rose as entrepreneurs discovered the need for complex information to survive. Accounting became a profession as business became big and important enough to employ professionals. The United States went from an agrarian backwater to an industrial power in 100 years. Accounting sophistication matched business complexity, as manufacturing accounting and control techniques developed capable of providing information needed to run giant firms. Railroads became big, requiring complex accounting system. Andrew Carnegie used his railroad experience to adapt the railroad accounting systems to steel manufacturing. Industries consolidated and the need for effective accounting control became imperative. Du Pont proved to be the most effective innovator and this knowledge expanded at General Motors, systems that dominated beyond the mid-20th century. Accounting History is written for accounting and business students plus business professionals. It’s not written for accounting historians, although they may find this book useful. The writing is basic without much jargon, so the general public will also find this book insightful.
Accounting history continues in Volume 2 with six chapters, four supplements, plus conclusions. Chapters 1 to 3 of the second volume cover specialty topics, specifically auditing, taxes, and government accounting. Chapters 4 to 6 march along from the New Deal to beyond the mortgage meltdown and Great Recession. Supplements include audit opinions (the audit reports written for the annual financial audits), the scandals and corruption associated with accounting fraud, the formal standard setting process creating generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), and finally computer technology, a key component of the accounting profession—and civilization. The concept of accounting as a profession developed by the 19th century, as accounting-related services (bankruptcy, taxes, and auditing) became important enough to hire experts and separate businesses to support these functions. Soon, licensing was required. Auditing and tax proved to be major money-makers for accountants. Accounting firms became mammoth and global (especially the Big 4) providing audit, tax and consulting services to giant multinational corporations as well as smaller business, governments, nonprofits organizations, and individuals. The rest of the book covers accounting since the early 20th century, when accounting became increasingly sophisticated and important to the commercial and political worlds. The 1920 reverted to “free markets,” financial market manipulation and speculation, fueled by abundant credit precipitating a boom; then the Great Depression, followed by FDR’s New Deal. Chapter 5 covers most of the post-World War II period. Chapter 6 covers the bubbles and busts of the late-20th century and beyond, with particular attention to Enron. Conclusions summarize the last 10,000 years of accounting, its overall impact on civilization, and predictions for the future.
Ferguson tells the human story behind the evolution of money, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest Wall Street upheavals. The author shows that finance is, in fact, the foundation of human progress.
Whether building a road or fighting a war, leaders from ancient Mesopotamia to the present have relied on financial accounting to track their state's assets and guide its policies. Basic accounting tools such as auditing and double-entry bookkeeping form the basis of modern capitalism and the nation-state. Yet our appreciation for accounting and its formative role throughout history remains minimal at best-and we remain ignorant at our peril. The 2008 financial crisis is only the most recent example of how poor or risky practices can shake, and even bring down, entire societies. In The Reckoning, historian and MacArthur "Genius" Award-winner Jacob Soll presents a sweeping history of accounting, drawing on a wealth of examples from over a millennia of human history to reveal how accounting has shaped kingdoms, empires, and entire civilizations. The Medici family of 15th century Florence used the double-entry method to win the loyalty of their clients, but eventually began to misrepresent their accounts, ultimately contributing to the economic decline of the Florentine state itself. In the 17th and 18th centuries, European rulers shunned honest accounting, understanding that accurate bookkeeping would constrain their spending and throw their legitimacy into question. And in fact, when King Louis XVI's director of finances published the crown's accounts in 1781, his revelations provoked a public outcry that helped to fuel the French Revolution. When transparent accounting finally took hold in the 19th Century, the practice helped England establish a global empire. But both inept and willfully misused accounting persist, as the catastrophic Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2008 have made all too clear. A masterwork of economic and political history, and a radically new perspective on the recent past, The Reckoning compels us to see how accounting is an essential instrument of great institutions and nations-and one that, in our increasingly transparent and interconnected world, has never been more vital.
The 10th anniversary edition, with new chapters on the crash, Chimerica, and cryptocurrency "[An] excellent, just in time guide to the history of finance and financial crisis." —The Washington Post "Fascinating." —Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek In this updated edition, Niall Ferguson brings his classic financial history of the world up to the present day, tackling the populist backlash that followed the 2008 crisis, the descent of "Chimerica" into a trade war, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, with his signature clarity and expert lens. The Ascent of Money reveals finance as the backbone of history, casting a new light on familiar events: the Renaissance enabled by Italian foreign exchange dealers, the French Revolution traced back to a stock market bubble, the 2008 crisis traced from America's bankruptcy capital, Memphis, to China's boomtown, Chongqing. We may resent the plutocrats of Wall Street but, as Ferguson argues, the evolution of finance has rivaled the importance of any technological innovation in the rise of civilization. Indeed, to study the ascent and descent of money is to study the rise and fall of Western power itself.
The anthology The Rise of Ancient Civilizations: Selected Readings features readings that emphasize how cultural interaction among ancient societies was the dominant factor that led to a rise in societal complexity and technological accomplishments, commonly referred to as "civilization." The collection begins with an introduction to anthropology, the study of culture, subfields of anthropology, and why the study of the rise of civilizations is important within the discipline. The readings that follow include both material evidence and historical narrative to provide students with greater awareness of how cultural interactions were received or ignored by certain societies, and the consequences of that acceptance or disregard. The readings explore various ancient civilizations, including the Minoans, Chinese, Maya, Incas, Harrapans, and Egyptians, written by renowned and revered anthropologists in the field. The Rise of Civilization is an excellent supplementary resource for courses in world prehistory, anthropology, archaeology, and cultural geography. Christopher S. Davis earned his Ph.D. in archaeology and M.A. in anthropology from the University of Illinois in Chicago. He is a post-doctoral fellow in teaching and mentoring, with an honorary affiliation with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois in Chicago Honors College. His doctoral research focused on the rock art and archeoastronomy of Paleoindians along the lower Amazon River in Brazil near the end of the Ice Age. He is currently involved in research on the various ways that knowledge is generated and transmitted within societies and throughout time.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations
Civilization was born eight thousand years ago, between the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, when migrants from the surrounding mountains and deserts began to create increasingly sophisticated urban societies. In the cities that they built, half of human history took place. In Babylon, Paul Kriwaczek tells the story of Mesopotamia from the earliest settlements seven thousand years ago to the eclipse of Babylon in the sixth century BCE. Bringing the people of this land to life in vibrant detail, the author chronicles the rise and fall of power during this period and explores the political and social systems, as well as the technical and cultural innovations, which made this land extraordinary. At the heart of this book is the story of Babylon, which rose to prominence under the Amorite king Hammurabi from about 1800 BCE. Even as Babylon's fortunes waxed and waned, it never lost its allure as the ancient world's greatest city. Engaging and compelling, Babylon reveals the splendor of the ancient world that laid the foundation for civilization itself.