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This review essay suggests considerations to be addressed in research design if research on a taxation subject is to succeed as rigorous accounting research, well grounded in relevant historical scholarship. Tax research must focus on substantive subjects that are recognizable as “accounting”; the methods, approach, and exposition must be “historical” to an acceptable standard; and the research must engage with relevant portions of the existing body of accounting historical scholarship. Further, scholarly engagement with the best researchers and liveliest debates that the disciplines of accounting and history have to offer will enrich the treatment of tax in accounting history

Seven British income tax disputes over depreciation (1875–1897) are analyzed in this contextual study. The legal cases reveal how uncertainty over meanings for “depreciation,” “profits,” and “capital” reflected social and political tensions which had commercial accounting implications. Case analysis yields evidence of how judicial support reinforced the Inland Revenue's technical authority over a competing tax administration institution and enabled its modern regulatory control over taxpayers to be constructed. The British example illustrates the ways in which technical and administrative practices may emerge from the contestation of meanings that takes place both in a wide political context and within particular institutional settings.

In 1855 Jane Carlyle, wife of historian Thomas Carlyle, appeared before the General Commissioners of Income Tax to appeal against her husband's assessment. Moulded around her memoire of the appeal, this paper explores the process of and social context for mid-nineteenth century English income taxation of profits, and the associated accountings and processes of accountability. It reveals how local tax authorities employed sovereign powers as the basis for regulatory control. The paper outlines conditions of possibility for the emergence of modern Inland Revenue powers based on disciplinary technologies.

Taxation practice represents a significant part of what may be classed as accounting practice. In contrast, taxation research represents a very small part of the accounting research field. This pap...

This paper constructs a method for assessing the degree of connection between tax rules and practices and financial reporting rules and practices in a country. Five types of connection and disconnection are suggested, and 15 arenas of accounting are proposed for assessment on this basis. The method is applied to four countries, partly in order to test the claim of a clear distinction between Anglo-Saxon and continental European countries.

The relationship between accounting and taxation in the United Kingdom is explored in this article. The first section considers historical reasons for the relative independence of contemporary calculations of accounting profits and taxable profits. Despite the formal independence of important aspects of the calculation regimes, effective interdependence of practice is a feature of the United Kingdom's tax and accounting histories. The second section outlines the current law and practice governing the recognition of taxable profits, and reviews the financial reporting standards and practices that have been developed to deal with tax/accounting differences. Finally, recent developments in financial report-ing and taxation are identified that are likely to have an impact on the character of the relationship between tax and accounting in the future.

'the policy of Russia has long been impregnated with the spirit of deadly hostility to England' asserted the leader writer in the Morning Herald in October 1838.1 Similar comments about Russia were a regular feature of the editorials of almost all of the major daily and periodical publications in England at that time. From small indications of suspicion and antipathy in the 1 820s, a nearly universally expressed fear and hatred of Russia had emerged ten years later. So intense was this feeling that less convinced contemporaries, recognizing that it was much more than the usual dislike of all that was strange and foreign, referred to it as Russophobia.2 Historians have studied this phenomenon in various ways. They have sought to investigate its effect upon the formulation of British foreign policy; they have tried to explain its origins and what fed and stimulated it during the 1830s and at subsequent periods during the nineteenth century. Some have put great emphasis upon the conflicting economic policies of the two states, others on the growing rivalry in the Near East and Central Asia, and others on the different internal political systems.3 On one point, however, there has been widespread agreement, that in the 1830s one man and his collaborators were largely responsible for the initial surge of Russophobia. That man was David Urquhart. One of the few contemporaries who tried to stem the tide of Urquhart's influence, Richard Cobden, wrote in 1836: 'One active mind [i.e.