Accounting for Profit and the History of Capital

Abstract

AbstractRather than being a timeless category, profit has a history as contingent and as eventful as any other. Focused on the United States, this article narrates a history of profit from the dissemination of early modern double-entry bookkeeping practices to the mark-to-market criteria of contemporary global capitalism. Profit, despite its changing accounting definitions, always concerns a rate over time. In addition to serving as a medium of competition and a category of distribution, a chief task of profit under capitalism is to organize capital’s inherent temporal motion. Posing the problem this way leads to the temporal logics of the changing forms of capital—the biological life cycle of the slave, the rusting obsolescence of the steel mill, the debt-financed “special purpose entity“ of today’s financial markets—from which capitalists define and make profit. It also leads to the history of corporations, ultimately the great scenes of action in profit’s history.