Alice in Accounting Land: The Adventure of Two Economic Historians in Accounting Records of the 19th Century

Revista Contabilidade & Finanças

Luciana Suarez Lopes¹  Anne Gerard Hanley¹ 

关键词: Public finance;    Municipality;    Balance sheet;    Budget;    Finanças públicas;    Município;    Balanço;    Orçamento;   

DOI  :  10.1590/1808-057x201411540

来源: SciELO

【 摘 要 】

This article aims to share our experience of working with São Paulo's municipal budgets published during the 19th century and discuss the difficulties of using this kind of source to analyze the municipal public finance from a historical perspective. The budget laws published draw the researcher's attention because they are abundant and relatively easy to work with, providing a huge documentary set that may be used as a means for studies in the fields of economic history, political history, and cultural history within the imperial period. These laws are printed, therefore, readable, and easily accessible through the digital web portal Acervo Histórico da Assembleia Legislativa do Estado de São Paulo Historical Collection of the São Paulo State Legislative Assembly]. They detail the origins and destinations of public resources, municipality by municipality, allowing the researcher to reconstruct the financial life of municipalities, identifying changes in time and space of the fortunes of the 19th-century São Paulo state communities. However, may we really trust these budgets? Conversations and collaborations between two researchers showed that these accessible, readable, and abundant sources are not as appropriate as they seem at first glance. This article reports our troubled and even contradictory journey into the world of municipal public accounting, in order to detail our findings and provide a warning on these sources. A comparative methodology between budget laws and handwritten balance sheets was used at time intervals of 1, 2, and 3 years, in search of correlations and adjustment patterns between budgeted and spent amounts of money. Our experience has shown that budget laws do not have much in common with the actual financial experience of municipalities within the imperial period, therefore, they are not the most appropriate sources to know the financial daily life in the 19th-century São Paulo state villages.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
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