The Study About Environment Of The Origin Of Double-entry Bookkeeping

The origin of double-entry bookkeeping is a major part of accounting history studies. Most previous studies focused on the perspective of double-entry techniques. Only a small number of scholars started from the economic environment.Economic environment plays the most important role in the social environments which impact the development of bookkeeping. The development of bookkeeping is determined by economic development. But economic, political and cultural reasons of social change are interrelated and interpenetration, in many situations, are reciprocal causation. Any kind of political, economic or cultural change would be hard to understand if out of the whole.Therefore, in this paper, a combination of historical and normative approach of study has been adopted. Based on the historical arguments, it analyses the changes of social environment how to impact the double-entry bookkeeping in order of time from three aspects including economic, political and cultural environment, especially the economic environment, and it reveals the relationship between the development of bookkeeping and social environment, which to some extent, rich the theory of accounting history.It was concluded that, in the late Middle Ages, the evolution of economic formation that from natural economy to commodity economy is the basis of emergence and development of double-entry. The change of the political system that from feudal system to "city public" promotes the generation of double-entry bookkeeping. Humanism advocated by Renaissance is the ideological root of emergence and development of double-entry.In this paper, there are some limitations. Doing the research needs to master the economic, political, cultural and other aspects of the historical data, and it is more difficult to combine the research with accounting. Due to the historical period of the study is long time ago, the directly related literature, especially in accounting is less. That led to the limitations of the study.