company shares, and one for the general operation of the company.32 The opera
tional part of the bookkeeping, such as the books of the ship scheepsboekenare
most relevant in assessing the size and profitability of the trading activities.
How to read the MCC double-entry bookkeeping system
General Notes on the MCC Bookkeeping
Our understanding of the bookkeeping system relies to some extent on our un
derstanding of the inventory of the MCC archive, because the bookkeeping is a
sizeable section in the archive, and not just one document. Apart from that, some
of the relevant bookkeeping is stored in sections of the archive which are not
defined as 'the bookkeeping' (de boekhouding), such as the administration of the
ship voyages. Willem Sybrand Unger, the original archivist of the MCC, indicates
in his inventory of the archive, Het Archief der Middelburgsche Commercie Com
pagnie, that there are inconsistencies in the terminology used by the MCC ship
officers, who recorded the financial administration on the ships. In addition, Un
ger indicates that his limited knowledge of accounting does not allow him to elab
orate on the business structure of the MCC.33 Although some inventories have
been corrected in the archive after Unger's categorization, we will see that some
of the documents and their designations still need to be interpreted with some
caution, especially on the levels 'below' the journal. The journal or 'daybook' re
cords all transactions as they happen on a daily basis and are subsequently trans
ferred to the relevant ledger accounts.34
It is important to recognize the MCC double-entry bookkeeping as a network
of different books containing different forms of information, organized according
to structural and referential rules. At the 'highest' level is a balance sheet (Balance),
which is a summary of the result of each ledger account (grootboekrekening) at
the end of a full year. The ledger accounts can be found in the ledger (Grootboek)
which is a categorized translation of information from the journal (JournaalThe
journal contains information in a chronological order, so the entries in the ledger
accounts are a categorized summary of the chronological entries in the journal. In
Figure 1, the overarching structure of this system is visualised. The books below
Koen van der Blij
175
32 Paesie, Geschiedenis van de MCC, 115.
33 Willem Sybrand Unger, Het Archief der Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie. 's-Graven-
hage, 1951, 10-11.
34 Boyns, Boyns and Edwards, Historical Accounting Records, 104.
