Governmentality rationales and calculative devices: the rejection of a territorial barter proposed by the King of Spain (XVII century) Alessandro Lai♥, Giulia Leoni♦ and Riccardo Stacchezzini♣ ♥ Alessandro Lai, Full Professor of Accounting, Dipartimento di Economia aziendale (Business Administration Department), University of Verona (Italy), tel. +39.045.8028574, fax +39.045.8028488, [email protected], corresponding author ♦ Giulia Leoni, Ph.D. Student in Business Administration, Dipartimento di Economia aziendale (Business Administration Department), University of Verona (Italy), tel. +39.045.8028296, fax +39.045.8028488, [email protected] ♣ Riccardo Stacchezzini, Assistant Professor of Accounting, Dipartimento di Economia aziendale (Business Administration Department), University of Verona (Italy), tel. +39.045.8028186, fax +39.045.8028488, [email protected] Alessandro Lai is the author of paragraphs 1 and 3, Giulia Leoni wrote paragraphs 2 and 4, while Riccardo Stacchezzini is the author of paragraphs 5, 6 and 7. Date of submission: April 7th, 2010 (paper submitted for the 6th Accounting History International Conference, Wellington, 18‐20 August 2010); revision: June 25th, 2010. 1 Governmentality rationales and calculative devices: the rejection of a territorial barter proposed by the King of Spain (XVII century) Abstract Almost 400 years ago, a territorial barter proposed by the King of Spain was refused by Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantova and Marquis of Monferrato. The barter would have stated the exchange of Monferrato with the Isle of Sardinia, a Vice-Reign of the Spanish kingdom. It was the 1618 when a Duke’s advisor drafted a report (“Relatione dell’Isola di Sardigna”) to highlight the financial and governmental matters of the island. This “Relatione”, together with the written correspondence among the governors and their advisors engaged in the deal, let us investigate the information that allowed the Duke to take his decision about the barter by considering the effects on the duchy welfare as well as the risks related to at-a-distance government. Drawing on the Foucauldian governmentality framework, we demonstrate that the barter denial has been the output of a rational behaviour driven by territorial governability aims. Keywords: governmentality; territorial barter; accounting and the state; accounting practices; political rationality; kingdom; duchy. 2 Governmentality rationales and calculative devices: the rejection of a territorial barter proposed by the King of Spain (XVII century) 1. Introduction This paper analyses a territorial exchange that was near to occur in Europe, during the XVII century. The Isle of Sardinia, a Spanish domain, was supposed to be exchanged with the Marquisate of Monferrato, a possession of the Duchy of Mantua: its strategic position made it desirable by the King of Spain, who wanted to get it in order to improve travels and trades from Genoa to Milan and to empower his domination in Northern Italy. Thus, the King of Spain proposed a barter transaction in which he offered to the Duke of Mantua the Isle of Sardinia. As the Duke of Mantua needed information about the Isle of Sardinia to decide about the territorial barter, a Duke’s advisor, Don Ottavio Gentili, had been on the Island for about six months in order to deepen its main features. The information he gathered was reported in the “Relatione sull’Isola di Sardigna” (“Report about the Isle of Sardinia”), an interesting example of territorial evaluation to be used to support government decisions. The Duke of Mantua needed broader information than financial ones; actually he had to integrate the financial calculation with governability information concerning people and resources, in order to verify the possibilities to govern them. From this perspective, the document was useful to understand both the actual contribution of the 3 exchange to the welfare of the whole duchy and the future opportunities in governing and exploiting that Island, that was so far from the “ground Duchy” of Mantua. We study the “Relatione” and other documents connected to it to highlight the reasons that might have led the Duke to the denial of that barter, by assuming that this decision was rationally based. In particular, we offer a methodological contribution within the stream of “new” accounting history (Napier, 2006) by showing how the Foucault’s concepts can be used to demonstrate the rationality of a governor decision, that in our research is the decision that led to deny the barter of a territory with an apparently more wealthy one. Our research proposal is supported by different sources. As primary sources, together with the “Relatione”, we considered a collection of letters among the Duke Ferdinando, the King of Spain Philippe III, the Duke’s advisor Don Ottavio Gentili, and the ambassador of Mantua in Madrid Don Giovanni Ottavio Gonzaga. Our secondary sources are mainly the “Registro delle spese della Ducal camera di Casale in provisionati” (“Accounting book recording the expenses of the Duchy government in Casale [of Monferrato]”), presented by Giorcelli (1893) and some papers concerning the negotio del baratto (barter deal), which helped us to denote the key-characteristics of territorial barters in XVI and XVII centuries. The paper proceeds as follows. The next section regards the theoretical framework to which we refer, that is the governmentality theory (Foucault, 1978) as developed in sociological and (critical) accounting studies (Miller and Rose, 1990; Rose and Miller; 1992; Murdoch and Word, 1997; Dean, 1999). Latour’s contribution (1987) on governing at-a-distance is considered as well. In the third section, the historical situation conducting to the barter proposal is described in order to explain the complexity of the assessment. In the fourth section the financial information about the territories to be 4 bartered are presented. Then, in the fifth section, the matters to be faced to govern the Isle of Sardinia are described in order to denote the Duke’s reasons of denial and to verify whether the denial can be considered rationally based. Finally, the two last sections discuss our findings and conclusions in respect of the theoretical framework and in compliance with the methodological contribution we aimed to offer. 2. Theoretical framework Government, in Foucault’s thought (1991, p. 95), “is a right manner of disposing things so as to lead [...] to an end which is «convenient» for each of the things that are to be governed”. Foucault enlightens in one of his famous discussion that governing a state means the “triangle [of] sovereignty, discipline and government”, where economy had a main role in increasing the knowledge of things that have to be governed. In fact, “the art of government is just the art of exercising power in the form and according to the model of the economy” (Foucault, 1991, p. 102). Economy and government are strongly interconnected; so the main concern of a governor is knowing the reality of the state through its economic matters. Furthermore, to form a broad economic knowledge the governor needs informative instruments: the “governmental technologies” (Rose, 1991; Rose and Miller, 1992). These instruments are a complex of calculative practices, techniques of notation, computation and calculation, procedures of examination and assessment essential to fulfil the political rationality of the governor and his political programmes (Miller, 1990; Gordon, 1991; Rose and Miller, 1992; Spence, 2009). Accounting, as a governmental technology and practice, provides information which 5 makes the reality calculable and the economic issues visible, in order to control and manage the state. Accounting practices constitute the main technologies of government in the hands of the governor (Miller, 1990; Miller and Napier, 1993). Moreover, that can be used in order to translate governmental polices into practice (Neu and Heincke, 2004; Jones, 2010). Actually, through the application of these practices, governors are able to control their domains (Neu, 2000; Alvarez-Dardet Espejo et al., 2002), even if they govern them at a distance (Latour, 1987). The financial information about the reality that has to be governed is essential in order to enlighten the area of intervention of government, to dispose things, to reach the welfare of the state (Murdoch and Ward, 1997; Riccaboni et al., 2006; Di Pietra and Magliacani, 2006; Sargiacomo, 2008). The financial perspective is central even in evaluating the possibility of governing a “new” territory, that may be a territory near to be conquered or acquired by a “new” governor. In fact, as for an already owned land, also in case of a potential new one, financial matters are useful to form a political rationality (Dean, 1999). Moreover, the government of a territory “requires an understanding of what the territory consists of, and what the objectives of government should be” (Murdoch and Ward, 1997, pp. 309). Financial and governmental information about a territory to be govern help to explain the rationality that drive the governor’s choices. Such choices can be explained by many rationality perspectives, as “there exist «multiple rationalities» in «the doing of research» [...] (Latour, 1987)” (Lodh and Gaffikin, 1997, p. 439), and rationality is situational (Wittengstein, 1972). The concept of rationality linked to the governmentality framework is the so-called “political rationality”, which can be interpreted as “the relatively systematic, explicit, discursive,