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How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance
W.W. Norton & Co.
October 2012
On Sale: October 2, 2012
304 pages
ISBN: 0393088960
EAN: 9780393088960
Kindle: B007Q6XKA8
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
Filled with colorful characters and history, Double
Entry takes us from the ancient origins of accounting
in Mesopotamia to the frontiers of modern finance. At the
heart of the story is double-entry bookkeeping: the first
system that allowed merchants to actually measure the worth
of their businesses. Luca Pacioli—monk, mathematician,
alchemist, and friend of Leonardo da Vinci—incorporated
Arabic mathematics to formulate a system that could work
across all trades and nations. As Jane Gleeson-White
reveals, double-entry accounting was nothing short of
revolutionary: it fueled the Renaissance, enabled capitalism
to flourish, and created the global economy. John Maynard
Keynes would use it to calculate GDP, the measure of a
nation’s wealth. Yet double-entry accounting has had its
failures. With the costs of sudden corporate collapses such
as Enron and Lehman Brothers, and its disregard of
environmental and human costs, the time may have come to
re-create it for the future.
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