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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 Pacioliβmonk, mathematician, alchemist, and friend of Leonardo da Vinciβincorporated 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 nationβs 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.
 Media BuzzAll Things Considered - October 4, 2012
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