Account books of the New Moscow English Mint in the 17th Century: Attempt of reconstruction

Abstract

Russian accounting practice before the era of Peter the Great's reforms is unfairly characterized by many scholars as primitive, and the accounting methods introduced in Russia by Emperor Peter are exclusively borrowed from Western Europe. However, archives contain documents that testify to the use of advanced methods of calculating the cost of finished products and procedures for internal control of inventories and cash at Russian state manufactories in the 16th-17th centuries. An example of the use of complex accounting techniques can be found in the income and expenditure books of the Moscow Printing House (1618-1700) that was not the only large state manufactory of that time. Unique documents of the New Moscow English Mint (1654-1663) have been preserved in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents. The authors of the article attempted to reconstruct the corpus of account books of the New Moscow English Mint using the comparative method and logical-analytical modeling and relying on the well-known and studied documents of the 17th century. The purpose of the study was to confirm the thesis about the existence of complex accounting techniques in Russia in the pre-Petrine era.