Artisans and small merchants as accountants of Tuscan institutions (14th–16th centuries)

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, Federigo Melis inaugurated a new strand of historical research based on accounting and raised the history of accounting to the status of a discipline . The documents of the Prato merchant Francesco Datini, which had remained hidden in a basement until 1870, were an optimum for Melis’s studies, because they constituted an almost complete archive that made it possible, for the first time, to reconstruct the accounting system of a pre-industrial merchant and make the scientific world understand how what was deposited in the archives was often not all that businessmen had produced. This not only meant a step forward in the knowledge of the world of direct sources for Economic History, but also that the study of accounting was not an end in itself, a pure rudiment, but rather served to elaborate a scheme within which to place the surviving accounting documents, in order to know the kind of information they could provide, enabling their critical study. And this practice not only allows us to verify what were the ways in which resources were managed and administered in the different contexts of the private sphere, from the family sphere to the conduct of a productive or commercial activity, but it becomes very useful when we are about to analyze public systems, since the reconstruction of the accounting system of the institutions, secular and religious, or of the urban government, not only constitutes the tool that more than any other allows us to learn about the concrete functioning of these entities, their organizational logic and their transformations, but it also enables us to analyze the system of attribution and distribution of responsibilities within them and to appreciate the socio-political context in which they operated, both centrally and locally, and their impact on the community . Melis limited himself to the study of Datini’s system of accounts, arriving at the formulation of an accounting scheme that was certainly adaptable, with a few variations, to the medium and large-sized companies of the period and the following centuries, at least until the 16th century, characterised by a vast activity, both in terms of merchandise and geography, by a significant volume of business and by the legal form of the company. Of course, in addition to a common accounting structure, some companies also kept special accounting records to meet specific needs determined by the type and complexity of the activity carried out, but also by the personality of the merchant or his accountant. But a different world was that of small businessmen, merchants and artisans, where by the latter adjective we mean those who devoted themselves - alone, with the help of family or collaboration of a few helpers - to the small production of manufactured articles destined mainly for the local market. We have not included in our consideration the so-called improper craftsmen, i.e. those masters who worked in the employ of a merchant, especially in the textile world, carrying out one of the various production phases in decentralised manufacturing . The accounting system of these merchants and artisans is a theme neglected by historiography, especially economic-historical historiography, as it suggests the dimension of micro-history, widely discredited in recent decades.