Historical Developments in the Accountancy Profession, Financial Reporting, and Accounting Theory contains ten manuscripts authored by C. Richard Baker during an academic career that spans four decades, picking up on various understudied threads of academic and professional initiatives over the past several hundred years.

The book presents a series of researched biographies of professional accountants who immigrated to the United States and developed their careers there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This volume is a tribute to the efforts of a relatively small group of Scots who helped to establish and nurture American public accountancy at a time when demand for its services greatly exceeded the ability of native-born accountants to provide them.

Global in scope, accounting has had its share of great thinkers and practitioners, from Luca Pacioloi, the father of accounting, to R. J. Chambers, W. W. Cooper, Yuji Ijiri, Stephen A. Zeff and other figures. This encyclopedia presents more than 400 entries that focus on such subjects as publications in the field, institutional bodies, accounting and economic concepts, accounting issues, authors in accounting, records, leaders in the profession, accounting in various countries, financial court cases, accounting exams and historical researchers.

Informs readers of the historical foundations on which the accounting profession is based, the historical antecedents of today's accounting institutions, and the historical impact of accounting. This book explores the lives and works of pre-eminent individuals in the profession's history.