Since the idea of rationality has been applied to the economy, it will come as little surprise to find that it is closely bound up with that of bookkeeping. In Italy, the technique was known as ragioneria. For the French, un livre de raison was a book of household accounts, while in Swiss German the Italian-derived term Ragionenbuch was current. Such usages may appear to support Weber's association of rationality (at least the rationality of world mastery) with the advent of capitalism and bureaucracy in Europe, which he links with the practice of double-entry bookkeeping (partita doppia, partie double). In the first chapter I suggested that, unless one could identify particular features of rationalising procedures as unique to the West which required, for their development, a special form of cognitive operation, to isolate a form of rationality of world mastery and identify it with Europe was an instance of circular not to say ethnocentric reasoning. In this chapter I claim that in the case of double-entry the second of these criteria does not hold, and that there must be considerable doubt about the first.

In his analysis of social and economic organisation, Weber argued that ‘capital accounting has arisen as a basic form of economic calculation only in the Western world’, that it is a form of monetary accounting which is peculiar to ‘rational economic profit-making’ and aimed at ‘the valuation and verification of opportunities for profit and of the success of profit-making activity’.