Emerging Evidence of Early Indian Accounting

The paper examines the extant late‐eighteenth‐century accounting record books of Kantababu, a Bengali property owner and silk trader. These annual records, in part destroyed by white ants and other insects, do not make up a complete set for more than any two Bengali solar years. Yet from the available evidence it is possible to make a case that some elements of the accounting systems used by Kantababu and his clerks have similarities to medieval and later European methods and to eleventh‐century methods used by Cairo merchants as evidenced by documents stored in the Genizah of the Old Cairo synagogue.