The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Making and Breaking of Nations
  • Published: 24 June 2015
  • ISBN: 9780718193621
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $27.99
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The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Making and Breaking of Nations

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A bold retelling of economic history reveals the central role of accounting in the rise and fall of nations.

In The Reckoning, award-winning historian Jacob Soll shows how the use and misuse of financial bookkeeping has determined the fates of entire societies. Time and again, Soll reveals, good and honest accounting has been a tool to build successful companies, states and empires. Yet when it is neglected or falls into the wrong hands, accounting has contributed to cycles of destruction that continue to this day. Combining rigorous scholarship and fresh storytelling, The Reckoning traces the surprisingly powerful influence of accounting on financial and political stability, from the powerful Medici bank in the 14th century Italy to the 2008 financial crisis.
  • Published: 24 June 2015
  • ISBN: 9780718193621
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $27.99
Categories:
Share…

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The Reckoning
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Praise for The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Making and Breaking of Nations

One longs for a way of reading history that makes some sense of the fickle financial forces that still seem to bind the world. Happily, this is what Jacob Soll has achieved in his brilliant, deceptively brief book

Andrew Benedict-Nelson, Los Angeles Review of Books

One of the world's pre-eminent experts . . . a dazzling book, rigorously researched and demonstrating an extraordinary scholarly range

Literary Review

In Soll's hands, accountability and accountancy becomes a way of investigating the rise and fall of nations

Duncan Kelly, Financial Times

A dramatic story of politics, morality, printing, temptation and the destiny of economic society

Emma Rothschild