Editorial: International Perspectives on Race and Gender in Accounting's Past: An Introduction

Abstract

This special issue reflects the continuing commitment by Accounting History to interrogate accounting in terms of the broader context in which it operates and so expose its long-standing enmeshment in racebased and gender-based systems of inequality. The special issue also reflects the journal’s attempt to respond to the now deafening calls for greater spatial and temporal diversity in historical research in accounting (see for example Carnegie & Potter, 2000; Carmona, 2004; Annisette, 2006). The contributions that constitute this issue in many respects (though not all) begin to counter the observed biases in extant accounting history research, which have prompted these repeated calls.Although the institutional affiliation of the contributors is still marked by a predominance of US, UK and Australian based scholars (Anderson, 2002; Williams & Wines, 2006), these countries do not dominate the settings for their studies. Instead the contributions herein include the underresearched settings of Asia and Africa along with the more familiar European ones. Further, the authorship of the contributions is overwhelmingly female and, in addition, private sector accounting does not reign as the principal object of study. Critically, of the almost 250 citations