The roles of accounting in agro-pastoral settings: The case of the landed estates of Prince Sambiase in the mid-eighteenth century

International literature on agricultural accounting has mostly focused on Anglo-Saxon settings and sought to document the development of accounting tools in large landed estates or to elucidate the rise of early modern accounting practices. However, the investigation of the roles accounting can play in the agricultural domain beyond its traditional function of promoting efficiency and rational decision making is yet to receive a significant level of interest. Informed by Miller and Power’s (2013) analysis of the functions accounting can have in different socio-institutional contexts, the paper adds to extant literature on agricultural accounting by considering the non-Anglo-Saxon context of Italy. It analyzes the roles of accounting in Prince Sambiase’s properties, in Southern Italy, in the mid-eighteenth century. Prince Sambiase was the owner of large estates in Calabria, a socially and economically underdeveloped area. Agricultural and pastoral activities were managed in a semi-feudal setting, combining serfdom and waged labor, barter and monetary exchange, consumption and production. Based on primary and secondary sources, this paper focuses on the property lists, inventories, the double-entry bookkeeping system, and workers control practices used on Prince Sambiase’s estates to document how they were employed as territorializing, adjudicating, mediating and subjectivizing practices.