Editorial

Welcome to the May 2023 issue of Accounting History. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the following people for their contributions to and ongoing support of the journal who, for various reasons, have chosen not to continue as editorial board members: Rob Bryer, Binh Bui, Warwick Funnell, Michael Jones, Kathryn Haynes, Jim McAloon, Barbara Merino, Marc Nikitin, Angelo Riccaboni and Utz Schäffer. Further, we would like to welcome Michele Bigoni, Federico Barnabè, Abdel Halabi, Sebastian Hoffmann, Sriyalatha Kumarasinghe, Martin Quinn and Anna Szychta as new editorial board members. This issue also contains a list of ad hoc manuscript reviewers for 2022. The editors gratefully acknowledge their assistance. It is our pleasure to advise the award of the 2022 Robert W. Gibson Manuscript Award to Lee Moerman and Sandy van der Laan for their article ‘Accounting for and accounts of death: Past, present and future possibilities’ which was published in volume 27, issue 1 of Accounting History. We also wish to acknowledge the highly commended article by Alan Sangster and Fabio Santini ‘Lost in translation: Pacioli’s de computis et scripturis’ in volume 27, issue 3. This May issue includes six full articles along with the call for papers for the Twelfth Accounting History International Conference (12AHIC) being held in Siena, Italy from 4 to 6 September 2024. The issue also contains calls for papers for two upcoming Special Issues: ‘Accounting for Death: An Historical Perspective’ and ‘Historical Accounting for Enterprise and Society in Africa’. We would encourage you to examine these opportunities and to contact the Special Issue Guest Editors if you need further clarification. Authors drawn from Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, the UK and the US have written for this issue, with articles covering a time span from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century. The issue begins with an article by Bradley Bowden and Peta Stevenson-Clarke entitled ‘Accounting, Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Multi-Continental Perspective’ that adds to the theoretical debate in the literature on the role of accounting in facilitating and recording the slave trade and slavery. Using the Trans-Atlantic Slave-trade Database, they examine the relationship between accounting, slavery, and capitalism from the sixteenth century taking a multi-dimensional integrated holistic perspective of the Atlantic slave trade. As a result, Bowden and Stevenson-Clarke argue that accounting within the slave economy performed a profoundly different role from the role it played in industrial capitalism. In addition, they conclude that the direct demographic impact on Africa was not disastrous, but the overall impact embedded inequalities, that the direct effects of the slave trade on European prosperity were modest and there is reason to question the efficiency of plantation slavery on the Antebellum South of the US. A systematic literature review of ‘Indigenous peoples and accounting’ is provided in the second article in this issue by Mohini Vidwans and Tracy-Anne DeSilva. This article uses the literature on Indigenous peoples and accounting to investigate accounting’s influence using themes relating to Editorial