Editorial: A general overview of perspectives and reflections on accounting’s past in Europe.

This editorial provides a general outline of the contributions offered by European accounting historians to the international debate. To assist in meeting this aim, we combine a literature review on various articles that have investigated, in different periods of time, the dimensions of the international accounting history community and the publication patterns of accounting history scholars (section 2), with an analysis of the articles published in three main specialist international journals (namely, Accounting, Business and Financial History Accounting History and The Accounting Historians Journal) during 2005–2008 (section 3). Such analysis serves to provide a background to the articles in this special issue, whose specific contributions and peculiarities are described in section 4. Finally, in section 5, we present the main conclusions of the analysis as well as opportunities for further research.