Answering the calls made to overcome methodological nationalism, this volume is the first examination of the links between corruption and imperial rule in the modern world. It does so through a set of original studies that examine the multi-layered nature of corruption in four different empires (Great Britain, Spain, the Netherlands and France) and their possessions in Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. It offers a key read for scholars interested in the fields of corruption, colonialism/empire and global history. The chapters ‘Introduction: Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era: Towards a Global Perspective’, ‘“Corrupt and rapacious”: Colonial Spanish-American past through the eyes of early nineteenth century contemporaries. A contribution from the history of emotions’, and ‘Colonial Normativity? Corruption in the Dutch-Indonesian Relationship in the Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries’ are Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

This book explores the theme of violence, repression and atrocity in imperial and colonial empires, as well as its representations and memories, from the late eighteenth through to the twentieth century. It examines the wide variety of violent means by which colonies and empire were maintained in the modern era, the politics of repression and the violent structures inherent in empire. Bringing together scholars from around the world, the book includes chapters on British, French, Dutch, Italian and Japanese colonies and conquests. It considers multiple experiences of colonial violence, ranging from political dispute to the non-lethal violence of everyday colonialism and the symbolic repression inherent in colonial practices and hierarchies. These comparative case studies show how violence was used to assert and maintain control in the colonies, contesting the long held view that the colonial project was of benefit to colonised peoples.

Anticorruption in History is a timely and urgent book: corruption is widely seen today as a major problem we face as a global society, undermining trust in government and financial institutions, economic efficiency, the principle of equality before the law and human wellbeing in general. Corruption, in short, is a major hurdle on the "path to Denmark" a feted blueprint for stable and successful statebuilding. The resonance of this view explains why efforts to promote anticorruption policies have proliferated in recent years. But while the subject of corruption and anticorruption has captured the attention of politicians, scholars, NGOs and the global media, scant attention has been paid to the link between corruption and the change of anticorruption policies over time and place, with the attendant diversity in how to define, identify and address corruption. Economists, political scientists and policy-makers in particular have been generally content with tracing the differences between low-corruption and high-corruption countries in the present and enshrining them in all manner of rankings and indices. The long-term trends & social, political, economic, cultural; potentially undergirding the position of various countries plays a very small role. Such a historical approach could help explain major moments of change in the past as well as reasons for the success and failure of specific anticorruption policies and their relation to a country's image (of itself or as construed from outside) as being more or less corrupt. It is precisely this scholarly lacuna that the present volume intends to begin to fill. The book addresses a wide range of historical contexts: Ancient Greece and Rome, Medieval Eurasia, Italy, France, Great Britain and Portugal as well as studies on anticorruption in the Early Modern and Modern era in Romania, the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the former German Democratic Republic.

Claims that liberalism tends to produce empires and empire kills or corrupts democracy in metropolitan "home" countries, using examples from British, French, and American imperial histories.

Many have told of the East India Company’s extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company’s exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company’s corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating, and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India. The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England’s development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess and how these three things provided the ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.

How did the premodern Ottomans understand public office corruption? To answer this question, Defining Corruption in the Ottoman Empire explores how Ottoman jurists, statesmen, political commentators, and others characterized this notion and what specific transgressions they associated with it before the nineteenth century. The book is based on extensive research and a wide variety of sources, including jurisprudential texts, imperial orders and communications, chronicles, and travel and diplomatic accounts. It identifies articulations of self-interested abuses of power by official and communal actors in these sources and illustrates how they resonate in some ways with modern perspectives. These premodern formulations, however, are shown to have collectively constituted a conceptual space that was contentious and temporally unstable, and no single overarching term was able to encapsulate all the specific misdeeds frequently linked to modern depictions of corruption. The book's genre-specific discursive survey is complemented by discussions that highlight, in the Ottoman context, the shifty boundaries that separated legitimate and illegitimate forms of revenue extraction; that examine the state's efforts to monitor and punish abuses by government officials; and that explore the context-dependent and often contested moralities of many acts, such as gift giving as bribery, office selling, and favoritism. It also considers the ways in which "corrupt" state actors might have rationalized their offenses. Defining Corruption is a conceptually driven work that is both comparative and interdisciplinary, engaging seriously with non-Ottoman historiographies, including broader Middle Eastern, European, and Chinese, and multiple disciplines besides history, in particular anthropology and economics, to provide a comprehensive analysis of premodern Ottoman perceptions of administrative abuse.

Corruption, Anti-Corruption, Vigilance, and State Building from Early to Late Modern Times challenges current historiographical approaches, proposing new interpretations to rethink the relation between corruption and the socio-political and economic transformations since early globalisation. By adopting both transnational and long-term approaches, the book explores the historical dimension of notions such as accountability, transparency, and vigilance in their immediate political, social, and legal contexts. The starting point is to view corruption not as a moral category that emerged in 1789 to delegitimise past, foreign or present state systems, but as a constantly contested concept that must also be historicised in past societies. The collection revisits chronologies and examines different local, regional, and national frames, highlighting that the path to modernity was contested and affected by a variety of unique circumstances, such as revolutions and external political powers. Building on the latest research and offering new methods of inquiry, this book is a compelling resource for academics interested in political history and the history of corruption.