Doctoral research [1981, Vol. 8, no. 1]

              The Accounting Historians Journal Vol. 8, No. 1 Spring 1981
DOCTORAL RESEARCH
Maureen H. Berry, Editor UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
The focus of this edition is on examination of interrelation-ships, many of them having international impacts or implications. We commence with consideration of the medium of exchange and its role in portraying economic events. A basic accounting princi-ple holds that the financial effects of economic transactions must be recorded in monetary units. Consequently it is often assumed that nonmonetary transactions, such as barters, can be translated into monetary exchanges, for accounting purposes, through analysis of the underlying economic events. Gerriets evaluates and refutes this supposition in her examination of the role of money in the eighth-century Irish economy. At that time, most economic trans-actions took the form of barters and determinations of the amounts and types of goods and services exchanged were heavily influenced by factors other than relative economic values. For example, a lesser noble was obliged to give up valuable commodities or ser-vices to his lord in return for protection. In deciding how much tribute to offer, assuming he had a choice, the noble would be less concerned with matching the fair market value of protection ser-vices to be received than with the power of his overlord to extract payment. The overlord would, likewise, have been more interested in extracting what each subserviant noble could pay rather than attempt to set "fair" prices. Therefore, recording the values of exchanged services in that type of environment was more of a con-ceptual than a practical proposition.
Jumping over a continent and a millenium, we turn to Smiley's description of trade, including barter transactions, in nineteenth-century rural America. Given the agricultural setting, it could have been expected that bartering would be an accepted, mutually-bene-ficial, approach to exchanging goods and services in the upstate New York of the last century. Perhaps surprisingly, however, Smiley shows that this was true for the nation as a whole, with barter levels on the increase as the years went by.