Cost accounting at Keswick, England, c. 1598-1615: The German connection

              The Accounting Historians Journal Vol. 17, No. 1 June 1990
John Richard Edwards CARDIFF BUSINESS SCHOOL, U.K.
George Hammersley EDINBURGH, U.K. and
Edmund Newell NUFFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD, U.K.
COST ACCOUNTING AT KESWICK, ENGLAND, c. 1598-1615: THE GERMAN CONNECTION
Abstract: The growing literature on the history of cost and man-agement accounting has left virtually unexplored the developments prior to the British industrial revolution. Recently the business notebooks of Daniel Hechstetter, the German manager of an En-glish copper works from 1597 to 1633, have been transcribed and published, making available what is probably the most detailed set of business records for a British-based industrial enterprise in this period. This paper examines Hechstetter's background and role at Keswick, and translates a sample of the calculations into modern English. These calculations show that a number of modern cost accounting concepts and procedures were in use by c. 1600. The significance of this in relation to our understanding of the de-velopment of cost and management accounting is assessed, and it is shown that there is a strong case for claiming that German enterpreneurs involved in this enterprise were responsible for introducing a range of cost accounting techniques to Britain.
It is evident from the growing number of published works on the subject that accounting and business historians are showing renewed interest in the origins of cost and management accounting. Furthermore, the findings of these studies are al-tering our understanding of the development of accounting procedures. For instance, until recently it was widely held that little or no progress was made in cost and management ac-counting in British industry before the end of the nineteenth century [e.g., E. Jones, 1981, pp. 111-16]. A growing body of evidence shows this view to be mistaken, and it is now accepted that a number of firms employed relatively sophisticated cost
The authors are grateful to the Historische Kommission der Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften for permission to reproduce material from Ham-mersley, 1988, and thank two anonymous referees for their comments.