Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire, 1600–1850
‘Mr. William Fittock, Mayor of St Mawes, in Cornwall, An[no] 1741 . . . being the fourth time of his Serving that Office & never betray’d his Trust but refus’d Extraordinary Bribes’ [BM Prints and Drawings, 1873,0712.686]. A rare positive image of an official praised for being not corrupt.
Trust and Distrust
Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire, 1600–1850
MARK KNIGHTS
1
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‘Mr. William Fittock, Mayor of St Mawes, in Cornwall, An[no] 1741 . . . being the fourth time of his Serving that Office & never betray’d his Trust but refus’d Extraordinary Bribes’ [BM Prints and Drawings, 1873,0712.686]. A rare positive image of an official praised for being not corrupt.
Preface
‘Corruption is the Cancer of the Body politick.’¹
‘Without influence, which you call corruption, men will not be induced to support government, though they generally approve of its measures’.²
‘We are become as remarkable for Corruption, as we were formerly for our public Spirit . . . there never was such a Sink of Corruption as this Island.’³
‘Can any man, in his Senses, affirm, that, as things are now circumstanced in this Country, it is possible to exterminate Corruption?’⁴
‘He that puts on a publick Gown, must put off a private Person’.⁵
ere is currently no overview of the relationship between corruption and office for the pre-modern period, or one that integrates domestic with the imperial debates, and this book attempts to fill the gap. It explores corruption in office in Britain and its empire over a ‘long early modernity’, running from the Reformation to Reform, c.1600–c.1850. During that time, the concept of both corruption and office markedly changed. ese shi s will be outlined; but just as important is the messy, protracted process by which they came about. As the quotations suggest, corruption in office was much talked about but there was disagreement about what it was and what, if anything, could be done about it.
e book is a mixture of synthesis of existing scholarship, covering a wide chronology and spatial reach, together with primary research based on both manuscript and printed sources, in order to enable greater depth of discussion on some themes. A surprising amount of material on corruption is available in print, largely because allegations became the subject of inquiries, courtrooms, investigations, vindications and refutations that all le a significant paper trail. Whilst there are some private papers that are illuminating, many of these too have been published.
One of the risks of writing over a long period and across different spaces is the loss of particularity and context. Specialists in certain periods and places may well find the accounts offered here to be unsatisfying for that reason. I have tried
¹ e Cra sman, no. 105, 6 July 1728.
² Henry Gunning, Reminiscences of the University, Town and County of Cambridge, From the Year 1780, 2 vols. (1854), i. 139. Gunning was recalling the words of the ‘borough-monger’ John Mortlock who converted Cambridge into a sort of personal fiefdom.
³ e Case of the Opposition Impartially Stated. By a Gentleman of the Inner-Temple (1742), 39.
⁴ Gentleman’s Magazine, xl. 584, Junius to John Wilkes, 7 Sept. 1771.
⁵ Francis Quarles, Wisdom’s Better than Money: or, e whole Art of Knowledge and the Art to Know Men (1st published 1640 as Enchyridion, 1698), 217. Quarles may have been repeating a colloquial proverb.
to compensate for this by occasionally plumbing in depth but I have sought patterns across time and place that would be impossible through highly detailed case studies. I nevertheless envisage a companion volume that details some of the rich stories that have inevitably been squeezed out here for reasons of space.
Because this book covers a large number of times and spaces, each with a considerable secondary literature, and also draws on insights from non-historical material, footnotes have been kept to a minimum but readers will find much more guidance in the bibliography. Particular attention is paid there to nonhistorical material that might be of interest to historians—this body of material has largely been excluded from the chapters but the bibliography will show how some of the book’s thinking is indebted to modern discussions. Although this is a book for historians, it is also designed to be of interest to social scientists, public administrators, lawyers, anthropologists, and sociologists, on whose work many of the sections draw. Both corruption and office are topics that cannot be neatly defined within a single disciplinary boundary; so any treatment of them should have a multi-disciplinary framework and have something to say to each of the cognate fields. Footnotes will nevertheless generally give information about primary and secondary material directly cited in the text; the bibliography gives a more expansive treatment for each theme. e exceptions to this approach are Chapters 3 and 4, which are themselves partly overviews of secondary literature.
Acknowledgements
I owe a special and great debt of thanks to Mark Philp, with whom I have had many productive and enjoyable conversations. He read many of the chapters, providing very helpful advice and encouragement, and it has been a great pleasure to have had him as a colleague. I dedicate the book both to him and to the late Colin Davis, for conversations about corruption that encouraged me to think of this as a worthwhile project.
I also thank my friends and family—especially Emma, Sam, and Caitlin, but also my parents, siblings, and wider kin—for listening to countless tales of corruption over a lengthy period; they will be relieved in all sorts of ways to see the book finally in print.
I have presented versions of chapters at a number of conferences and seminars in Amsterdam, Brighton, Cambridge, Chicago, Keele, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Milan, Oxford, Paris, Pavia, Reading, Sheffield, Stratford-upon-Avon, Venice, Yale and Warwick, where many colleagues have kindly provided much useful feedback, so thank you to everyone who participated and asked questions. I am also grateful to Stephen Alford, Andreas Bågenholm, Robert Barrington, Monika Bauhr, Trevor Burnard, Christian Burset, Emanuela Ceva, Penelope Corfield, Margot Finn, Aaron Graham, Philip Harling, Lisa Herzog, Daniel Hulsebosch, Joanna Innes, Ronald Kroeze, Simon Middleton, Steve Pincus, David Chan Smith, Charles Walton, Callie Wilkinson, and Nick Wilson for answering questions, reading chapters, providing references, supporting funding applications, and stimulating discussions. e book was started with the aid of an AHRC Leadership Fellowship and concluded with the help of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and I am very grateful to both funds for their support. e University of Warwick also generously covered the costs of the images. anks also to Lucy Sparks and her colleagues at Lear Fitness who worked wonders on the pains resulting from being too long in front of a PC.
A shorter version of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘Corruption as the Abuse of Entrusted Power’, in Nicoletta Parisi, Gian Luca Potesta, and Dino Rinoldi (eds.), Prevenire la Corruzione (Naples, 2018).
I publish an occasional blog about corruption past and present at https://blogs. warwick.ac.uk/historyofcorruption/
I wrote a report for Transparency International which is free to download at https://www.transparency.org.uk/publications/old- corruption- what- britishhistory-can-tell-us-about-corruption-today/
Conventions and Information
Some spellings have been silently modernised—vv has become w, and v become u, for example. Contractions in early printed works have also been silently expanded.
e Text Creation Partnership has now transcribed over 44,000 texts published before 1700; and a group of corpus linguists at Lancaster have fed these into a database of almost 1.2 billion words [https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/]. is also has tools for the analysis of the corpus that take account of the fluctuations in the quantity of print published at any time, so that a ‘frequency’ can be determined that is relational to total output. is mitigates any data that automatically show a rise for any term in the 1640s, for example, when print production suddenly increased dramatically. I am very grateful to the Lancaster team for granting me access to the database. We do not have such sensitive data for the eighteenth century as for the pre-1700 period, since digitised post-1700 printed material relies on OCR technology which is far less accurate than hand-entered data. Searches of digitised newspapers from the later eighteenth century onwards can also offer some useful data. So linguistic analysis has been based on all these different platforms and tools.
Currency issues are fraught because values changed over time. e following might be helpful guides. ere were about 8 rupees to the pound sterling in 1770 [ e True Alarm, 73]. A lakh = 100,000 (usually of rupees); 100 lakh made 1 crore. A pagoda was a coin made of gold or half-gold, varying in value but worth about 3.5 rupees. To gain an idea of the present-day value of old sterling over time, see https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/ Indian correspondence sometimes uses Presidencies for locations. Fort William was in Calcutta for the regional governance of Bengal. is was the base of the Governor-General. Fort St George was in Madras for the regional governance of southern India. I use pre-modern names for other places. I use ‘East Indiaman’ to refer to people rather than, as is more usual, to ships. Where no name is given before a publication, it was anonymous. Names in square brackets are possible or probable authors. Place of publication in the footnotes and bibliography is London unless otherwise stated.
Cover. A detail from James Gillray, ‘A Bow to the rone’ (1788), BM Sat. 7312. e image shows Warren Hastings, Governor-General of India, in oriental dress, handing money bags to Prime Minister William Pitt and Lord Chancellor urlow. King George III and his wife Charlotte are shown grasping at money on the floor. Caps of officials are held out to be filled with money.
Frontispiece.‘Mr. William Fittock’ (1741), BM Prints and Drawings, 1873,0712.686. ii
1.1. A detail from omas Rowlandson, ‘A Rough Sketch of the Times as deleniated [sic] by Sir Francis Burdett’ (1819), BM Sat. 11553. 3
1.2. East India Company gross annual revenues, 1762–1859. Graph based on John F. Richards, ‘Fiscal States in Mughal and British India’, in Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, Patrick K. O’Brien, and Francisco Comín Comín (eds.), e Rise of Fiscal States: A Global History, 1500–1914 (Oxford, 2012), 410–72, fig. 17 at 419. 12
1.3. e increase of East India Company rule in India, 1765–1857. Courtesy of the Edinburgh Geographical Institute, from the Imperial Gazetteer of India (Oxford, 1907). 16
4.3. ‘ e “System” that “Works so Well”!!’ (1831), BM Sat. 16610. 74
4.4. A detail from ‘ e Grounds’ (1741), BM Sat. 2484. 80
4.5. ‘ e Reformers’ Attack on the Old Rotten Tree’ (1831), BM Sat. 16650. 85
4.6. e growing incidence of the use of ‘bribery’ in e Times 1785–1850, plotted as a percentage of the overall total of issues. 94
6.1. e rapid rise of the language of interest in the seventeenth century, expressed as frequency in use of the word ‘interest’ per million words (CQPWeb). 147
6.4. James Gillray, ‘ e V[ictualling] Committee Framing a Report’ (1782), BM Sat. 6021. 178
6.5. George Cruikshank, ‘ e Clerical Magistrate’ (1819), BM Sat. 13303. 182
7.1. ‘ e Tree of Taxation’ (1838), BM Print 1868,0808.9530. 186
7.2. ‘ e Tenth Report’ (1805), BM Sat. 10384. 220
7.3. ‘John Bull Reading the Extraordinary Red Book’ (1816), owned by author. 224
7.4. ‘Makeing Away with Official Papers for Necessary Purposes’ (1806), BM Sat. 10382. 226
8.1. A medal of Gwyllym Wardle BM M.5326. 248
8.2. omas Rowlandson, ‘A Rough Sketch of the Times as deleniated [sic] by Sir Francis Burdett’ (1819), BM Sat. 11553. 252
9.1. ‘ e Champion of Liberty’ (1810), BM Sat. 11531. 262
9.2. ‘ e Festival of the Golden Rump’ (1737), BM Sat. 2327. Wellcome Collection.
10.1. James Gillray, ‘ e Political Banditti Assailing the Saviour of India’ (1786), BM Sat. 6955.
291
300
10.2. Frontispiece of John Wade, e Black Book; or Corruption Unmasked! (1820), courtesy of University of Warwick Library Special Collections. 302
10.3. A detail from ‘8th Commandment— ou Shalt Not—Steele’ (1807), BM Sat. 10743.
10.4. A detail from ‘ e Acquital’ [sic] (1741), BM 2486.
312
316
10.5. ‘In Office. Out of Office’ (1784), BM Sat. 6207. 317
11.1. omas Rowlandson, ‘ e Road to Preferment through Clarkes Passage’, BM Sat. 11239. 342
11.2. An advertisement from the Oracle and Public Advertiser, 20 January 1798. 346
11.3. ‘Places of Profit’ from e Scots Scourge [c.1763], BM Sat. 4080. 355
11.4. An advertisement from the Morning Post, 8 August 1800. 369
12.1. An election mug of 1761, BM 1959,0402.1 384
12.2. William Hogarth, ‘Election Entertainment’ (1754), BM Sat. 3285. 385
12.3. A detail from ‘Ready Money the Prevailing Candidate’ (1727), BM Sat. 1798. 386
12.4. ‘ e Bow to the rone’ (1788), BM Sat. 7312. 399
12.5. ‘Rat-Trap’ (1773), BM Sat. 5197. 404
12.6. ‘Lork what a long tail our cat has got’ (1831), BM Sat. 16578. 413
Beinecke
BL
List of Abbreviations
Beinecke Library, Yale University
British Library
BM British Museum
BM Sat.
British Museum Satire
Bodleian Bodleian Library, Oxford
CHJ Cambridge Historical Journal
CJ Commons Journals
CMTA Company of Merchants Trading to Africa
Cobbett’s Parl. Hist. William Cobbett (ed.), Cobbett’s Parliamentary History: From the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the Year 1703 (36 vols., 1807).
J. Wright edited vols. 13–36
Cornwallis Corresp. Charles Ross (ed.), e Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis (3 vols., 2nd edn., 1859)
CQPWeb e Corpus Query Processor at the University of Lancaster
CRO Cumbria Record Office
CSPC Calendar of State Papers Colonial
CSPD Calendar of State Papers Domestic
EHR English Historical Review
EIC East India Company
Hansard T. C. Hansard, e Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803
HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission
HJ Historical Journal
HoP e History of Parliament website https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/
IOR India Office Records
JP Justice of the peace
LJ Lords Journals
MS/MSS Manuscript/manuscripts
N&Q Notes and Queries
NGO Non-governmental organisation
NLS National Library of Scotland
NUL Nottingham University Library
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
OED Oxford English Dictionary
P&P Past & Present
Parl. Reg.
John Debrett (ed.), Parliamentary Register or History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Lords (77 vols., 1775–1801). e work was also edited by John Stockdale and John Almon
Pepys Diary e Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (UCLA, 1983)
PP Parliamentary Papers
RAC Royal Africa Company
SPG Society for the Propagation of the Gospel State Trials
William Cobbett (ed.), Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials (33 vols., 1809). Later volumes were edited by omas Howell and David Jardine
TNA e National Archives
TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
Wraxall, Memoirs e Historical and Posthumous Memoirs of Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall, 1772–1784, ed. Henry B. Wheatley (5 vols., 1884)
1 Introduction
‘ ere is no Man so improper to be employed in Business, as he who is in any degree capable of Corruption.’¹
In 1600 corruption was primarily seen in religious terms, meaning original sin or sinful behaviour. It did have other connotations: for example, political corruption meant the decay of the polity, largely as the result of a lack of individual and societal virtue that made the state vulnerable to the corrupting influences of luxury, ambition, and vested interests. Corruption of the judiciary, through bribery, was also a concern, as was the corruption of discourse and the corruption of sexual morality.² ese meanings did not entirely fade and some, such as sexual corruption, persisted; but over time some newer strands of meaning became important. By 1850 corruption tended to mean financial and political corruption, embezzlement or abuse of public funds, venality, the abuse of office for private gain, breach of trust. Corruption had acquired a more specific sense, closely related to office. e concept and purpose of office also shi ed, so that we might even talk of the ‘invention of public office’. Over the period under consideration, office evolved from being something that was considered a piece of property with extensive personal privileges to something that was public with very restricted and defined forms of enrichment. is important reconceptualisation reflected the rise of ‘the public’ as well as of the state as a conceptual entity with agency and identity. e shi away from thinking of office as personal property meant that it was not the officer’s to sell; that it should be rewarded formally by a salary; that the officer should not receive gi s; that it was a public trust; that the officer should be accountable to the state or corporation or public; and that conflicts of interest between the individual holder and the public or employing institution should be avoided. Over a long period of time a change is discernible, producing not so much an impersonal, bureaucratic state as a ‘jealous’ state that had gradually appropriated the rights and privileges once associated with individual officers. is is therefore a study of moving targets: corruption and office were both evolving as concepts and practices. Neither ‘corruption’ nor ‘office’ were
¹ e Spectator, 28 Aug. 1712. is chapter is deliberately lightly footnoted, but please see the bibliography for relevant material.
² ere was also corruption of the body or natural material, which provided a metaphor for other types of corruption.
unchanging universals: they had to be forged, shaped, and remoulded to suit evolving circumstances and demands. eir disputed definition and ambiguous meaning over time and place is at the heart of this study. And their evolution was intertwined and interlinked: corruption became closely identified with abuse of office and the shi ing ideas about office helped to define what constituted corruption. Moreover, if corruption and office evolved alongside each other, their co-development was also shaped by changes in the state and empire, and the redrawing of the boundary between public and private. Given these interconnections, it is inevitable that the story will be a complex and at times messy one rather than a linear narrative of progress towards the birth of modern bureaucracy. is introduction sets out how we might tell that story, seeking to frame, and to some extent summarise, the discussion of the following chapters with an overview of some of the moving parts.
Modern notions of corruption as the abuse of office suggest that it is a practice that can be eradicated using the right tools. Corruption, in this sense, is a ‘thing’ that can be identified and then removed. But corruption was not always seen as a clearly defined ‘thing’ and its meaning changed over time and space. In 1600, many saw profiting from the public money in their hands as a legitimate form of reward for their services, and the sale of office remained widespread, if increasingly controversial, until the early nineteenth century. What some saw as bribes or conspiratorial networks, others saw as gi s and patronage. Indeed, what seems to us now to be corrupt behaviour was o en defended at the time as legitimate.³ is means that corruption was a construct as much as a ‘thing’. at is to say, the word ‘corruption’ was invoked because it was a term that carried great political, moral, social, and cultural weight but it was a container or signifier that could describe a variety of behaviours and what was meant by it varied according to time, place, and purpose. Moreover, the variables that helped to compose it—the nature of office or of gi s or of the state or of the company, and the meaning of ‘public’ and ‘private’, ‘friends’, ‘patrons’, ‘disinterestedness’, ‘trust’, and ‘accountability’—also changed over time. e historian is interested in how and why ‘corruption’ and these other terms were used; the ways in which their meanings evolved, together with the implications of that evolution; as well as the shi ing ‘complex’ of constituent parts that helped to formulate ‘corruption’. ‘Corruption’ was like a hydra: it had many heads connected to a common body but it was also an imaginary and protean monster whose composition could shi .⁴ Alternatively, it could be
³ Mark Knights, ‘Explaining Away Corruption in Pre-Modern Britain’, Social Philosophy & Policy 35:2 (2019), 94–117.
⁴ ‘ e Champion of the People’ (1784) depicted Charles James Fox cutting off ‘Corruption’ from a hydra that has other heads labelled ‘Tyranny’, ‘Despotism’, ‘Oppression’, ‘Secret Influence’, ‘Dependency’, and ‘Assumed Prerogative’. For other images associating a hydra and corruption, see ‘Britannia Excisa’ (1733); ‘ e Champion of Oakhampton, Attacking the Hydra of Gloucester Place’ (1809); ‘ e Champions of Reform Destroying the Monster of Corruption’ (1831). e idea that ‘corruption’ was variously constructed through different configurations is very usefully explored in
Fig. 1.1 A detail from omas Rowlandson, ‘A Rough Sketch of the Times as deleniated [sic] by Sir Francis Burdett’ (1819), BM Sat. 11553. See Fig. 8.2 for the full version. e ‘Monster of Corruption’ is a composite creation, having a large ‘Eye to Interest’, ‘Legs of Luxury’, ‘Hands of Extortion’, and personal characteristics such as ‘A Mouth of Guile’ and a ‘Cringing Soul’. e monster’s head also has anti-Semitic features.
depicted, as in Fig. 1.1, as a monstrous body composed of many different associated parts.
If ‘corruption’ was in part a construct, it was the result of historically contingent factors rather than fixed universal values. It is true that abusing the power of office to extract money for personal use or seeking unfair or excessive private gain, to the detriment of the public, was widely condemned behaviour across time and space. But ‘abuse’, ‘fairness’, ‘excess’, ‘private’, and ‘public’ were not fixed values. A ‘fee’ for a service was routine in a society that offered very low salaries; it became reprehensible when the demand was deemed to be too high and was oppressively extracted. e moral line was a matter of interpretation. Sir John Shore resisted ‘much scope for corruption’ as a revenue collector in India: ‘if I had
Michael Johnston’s Syndromes of Corruption: Wealth, Power and Democracy (Cambridge, 2005). See bibliography for analysis of Johnston’s important contribution.
been half the knave every one is supposed by the patriots of England to be’, he wrote in 1784, ‘I might have secured [£]40,000 or 50,000 per annum for the last four years’.⁵ Shore was a religious man guided by his conscience; but how were others to judge the moral line? What constituted ‘excessive private gain’ varied according to time and place, in the same way as a ‘just profit’ or ‘sufficient’ fortune (what contemporaries such as Lord Cornwallis, Governor-General of India, called a ‘competency’⁶) varied according to time and place. In India in the mid-eighteenth century, at the height of gains there, Harry Verelst thought £25,000–30,000 ‘sufficient to set down with myself and also to serve my friends’ but others there thought even more was necessary: George Vansittart put his own wants in 1774 at £50,000 and advised his nephew in 1786 to get £60,000.⁷ But these returns were much higher than in Britain where Adam Smith thought 8 or 10 per cent a good profit; indeed it was this disparity that made East Indian fortunes so glaring.
Remuneration was, for much of this period, a mixture of the formal and semiformal. Salaries in the state and companies were low, compensated for by fees, perquisites, ‘favours’, and in the East India Company (EIC), from the late seventeenth century, permission to engage in private trade. ere was a logic to such accumulation since there was almost no system of pension for old age, so that officers had to accumulate sufficient sums to provide for life out of post. Such a system had the advantage for the state and companies that it kept operating costs very low and hence also reduced the tax burden.⁸ But it also meant that the dividing line between licit and illicit remuneration was blurred and increased the temptation to maximise the informal revenue for the officeholder. e earl of Sandwich told his client, Samuel Pepys, at the outset of his career in 1660 ‘that it was not the salary of any place that did make a man rich, but the opportunities of getting money while he is in the place’.⁹ One experienced customs official noted in 1782 that a tidewaiter in the Customs earned so little that his ‘place wont maintain a man, so he is forct to be a rogue against his will or he and his family will starve’.¹⁰
Over time there was an increase in salaries for both state and company officers, with an associated shi away from the informal rewards of the old system. Reform
⁵ Charles Shore, Lord Teignmouth (ed.), Memoir of the Life and Correspondence of John, Lord Teignmouth, 2 vols. (1843), i. 75.
⁶ Arthur Aspinall, Cornwallis in Bengal: e Administrative and Judicial Reforms of Lord Cornwallis in Bengal (Manchester, 1931), 38.
⁷ Peter Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: e British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (1976), 216–217.
⁸ Joel Hurstfield, e Queen’s Wards: Wardship and Marriage under Elizabeth (1958), 345–349. Aylmer rightly doubted whether this was the result of an intentional policy and noted that the informal system was a form of indirect taxation [Aylmer, ‘Office Holding’, 234].
⁹ Pepys Diary, 16 Aug. 1660.
¹⁰ Arthur Lyon Cross, Eighteenth Century Documents Relating to the Royal Forests, the Sheriffs and Smuggling: Selected from the Shelburne Manuscripts in the William L. Clements Library (New York, 1928), 250.
along this line was suggested in the 1780s, both in Britain and in India, where Lord Cornwallis found that low salaries were a ‘false economy’ and encouraged corruption.¹¹ is trend was further fostered by Utilitarians. Jeremy Bentham laid out the maxim: ‘Integrity is more easily preserved in public offices in which there are no fees, than in those where they are allowed. A lawful right o en serves as a pretext for extortion.’¹² Indeed, one of his ‘rules’ was that
In employments which expose the public functionary to peculiar temptations, the emoluments ought to be sufficient to preserve him from corruption . . . A salary proportionate to the wants of the functionary operates as a kind of moral antiseptic, or preservative. It fortifies a man's probity against the influence of sinister and seductive motives.¹³
Alongside these ideas was greater attention to superannuation and pension schemes.¹⁴ e Fee Commissioners in 1786 recommended that every officer who retired on account of age or infirmity should have ‘A decent provision made for his future subsistence’ and in the first half of the nineteenth century progress was made with instituting retirement schemes.¹⁵ But although gathering pace in the early nineteenth century, the very real and important shi from informal to formal remuneration was a protracted process. Fees were only phased out for Exchequer officials in 1847–8. For much of the period covered by this book, formal and informal remuneration o en overlapped. e boundary between illicit and licit acts was shaped by a host of contextual factors: religious and legal tradition; the nature of social and cultural practices such as friendship and patronage; the nature of economic development and attitudes towards private interest as an economic driver; the conventions surrounding office holding at local and national level; the functions of representative institutions, and so on. As a result, a history of the abuse of office will also necessarily also be a history of how these contextual factors changed over time and hence also of the state, religious culture, the market, and social conventions. Corruption is thus a register of the societal strains associated with changing institutions, practices, mindsets, ideologies, and external pressures. e perception of extensive corruption may tell us less about the absolute quantity of corrupt activity than about the mixture and nature of challenges to accepted values and ways of doing things. Corruption may not always have been the most pressing concern in relation to office—but it unfailingly offers insights into tensions and strains operating in the polity.
¹¹ Aspinall, Cornwallis, 35–36.
¹² Jeremy Bentham, e Rationale of Reward (1825), bk. 2, ch. 2.
¹³ Ibid., bk. 2, ch. 7: Rule V.
¹⁴ C. G. Lewin, Pensions and Insurance before 1800: A Social History (East Linton, 2003).
¹⁵ 1786 report, PP 1806, ix. 14.
e definition of corruption at any time and place was determined by those who had a vision of what an uncorrupt polity might look like. ‘Anti-corruption’ thus shaped ‘corruption’. eir interaction was also intrinsic to the evolution of the state and corporation. Abuse of office was like grit in an oyster, at once ‘damaging’ but also having a creative and innovative effect. e perception of corruption in office fostered reforms that o en extended the reach of the state; but as the state grew, it also opened up new scope for abuses of office, leading to further attempts at reform. Calls for retrenchment included anti-corruption measures that sought to make the state more efficient and more legitimate. Corruption and anti-corruption are, then, two sides of the same coin: iterative opposites locked in a dynamic process of interaction. So when examining allegations of corruption in office we need to ask why they were made (in terms of motivation, timing, and function), who benefited from them, and with what result. As James Scott put it, ‘one must ask of corruption the same questions one asks of any other political process: who gets what, when and how?’¹⁶ Anti-corruption has to be analysed just as much as the alleged corruption. Anti-corruption was political, serving a number of purposes at individual, group, and state level. e accusation of corruption was one that could delegitimise, undermine, or even destroy a rival; it could engender a sense of moral superiority and feed outrage; it could be used by partisans to gain advantage; and it could strengthen and legitimise the market, state, or imperial project. Anti-corruption was an inherently politicised process, o en driven by partisan rivalries and diverging ideologies, even if, ironically, one of its consequences was the ideal of an impartial civil servant.
e shi ing concept of corruption, the birth of public office, the development of the state and empire, and the redrawing of public and private were all contested processes. Differing visions, ideals, and practices were offered by individuals, groups, and institutions. ese contests were intensified by processes of moral reform and fiscal retrenchment (especially a er war), as well as processes of scandal and popular pressure, creating a national debate that helped to delineate the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in office. Moments of crisis thus offer insights into shi ing norms and processes; but the battle between contending versions of corruption, office, the state, the corporation, and the public or private was an ongoing one.
ere were some key features of both corruption and office that endured across time and space. Corrupt acts were nearly always seen as breaches of a moral code (sometimes, though not always, embedded in law) to the damage of the public or of an institution. But there was disagreement about what breached acceptable boundaries. Although corruption implied a moral crime, in many instances those
¹⁶ James C. Scott, ‘ e Analysis of Corruption in Developing Nations’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 11:2 (1969), 340.
alleged to be corrupt argued they were doing what others did, or what custom allowed, or what was justifiable because they sought to combine their own gain with that of the state or corporation for which they worked. Contemporaries differed about what constituted a breach or abuse; what the moral code was or should be; what discretionary powers an officer enjoyed; who the public was, what role it should play, and how far individual interests could advance the public good; as well as who empowered officers, and on what basis and with what powers. ose disagreements loom large in the following pages, involving the officials themselves but also the state, corporations, and the wider public. Yet it was through the contests over what constituted corrupt behaviour in an officer that these concepts changed meaning. Modern anti-corruption policy has tended to seek universal solutions to impose, top-down, on corrupt countries; but the British story suggests that solutions were worked out in the national context through a prolonged engagement between the state, corporations, citizens, and officers. at engagement took place within the departments of the state, within corporations, in the public sphere, in artistic culture, in the courtrooms, in churches, in imperial contexts, and indeed almost anywhere where concepts of public duty and public ethics played a part.
e definition of both corruption and office was greatly influenced by the notion of trust—and its inverse, distrust. Trust, as the fiduciary concept of entrusting power to an agent, became a key way of thinking about office, from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. It moved from being a legal tool applicable to private estate law to one applied to public office holding, a shi that was largely the result of ideological battles in the 1640s and 1650s which had an enduring legacy both at home and in the empire. When an officer was entrusted with certain duties and powers, he was expected to perform well, in the interests of the entruster and the public. inking of office as a legal trust helped to develop ideals of integrity, disinterestedness, and accountability. e fiduciary trust was different to a contract, which specified exactly how an agent was to perform; a trust carried discretionary powers to act in the best interests of the entruster or beneficiary. Trust in officers, that they would perform their duty wholly in the interest of the entrusting power, was thus an important commodity. Some of the trustworthiness of an officer stemmed from the institution in which he operated; but some of it was more personal, resting on the relationship between the agent and the entruster and on the integrity of the agent. Entrusted power, with its level of discretionary action and reliance on an agent who almost certainly had his own interests, was always open to abuse at both the institutional and personal level. Whilst the trust implied a confidence that abuse of the entrusted power would not happen, it could not guarantee this. Moreover, although social, interpersonal trust between officers and the wider world was o en consolidated by practices of friendship, gi giving, and patronage, these were highly vulnerable to allegations of corruption.
An element of distrust was necessary to ensure the smooth functioning of the trust. But this distrust had to be embedded at institutional level to avoid personalising and undermining the trust between principal and agent. us small measures of distrust became central to emerging ideas of accountability, to policing conflicts of interest, to prohibitions on venality, to institutional checks and balances, and to curbs on instrumental gi ing. Scandals were also manifestations of distrust and cumulatively created constraints on malfeasance. But whilst a little distrust increased trust, too much distrust undermined it, leading to vicious cycles in which distrust could become a destructive feedback loop: distrust provoked closer scrutiny and regulation which, when breached, created further distrust. Maintaining the balance between trust and distrust was central to government and its legitimacy, but the processes of change meant this required constant recalibration.
e following chapters unpack some of the key attributes of this trust/distrust dichotomy. A central feature of the fiduciary trust was an obligation to act selflessly in the interest of the entruster and beneficiary, an obligation that focused attention on conflicts of interest, self-interests, and disinterestedness. e trust was also something from which a profit ought not to be made by the trustee, a concept that helped to render sale of office problematic. Trust also required accounting (a clear record of how the trust had been executed) and accountability (the holding of trustees to account for how they behaved). is fostered notions of formal accountability, through audit and national accounting mechanisms, for how public money was spent, as well as informal, public accountability, especially through the press which was o en used to expose and pursue corruption. is triggered a domestic and imperial debate about the freedom of the press in relation to the criticism of officials. Distrust also played a major part in the politics of anti-corruption, which was particularly acute in imperial contexts.
I use a broad definition of office. Modern discussion about corruption in office tends to revolve around the issue of bribery of state or public officials. Yet in the pre-modern period ‘office’ was not limited solely to those authorised by the state but was applied to all sorts of other roles. Even friends, for example, did ‘good office’ to each other when they helped each other and there were many offices that straddled the divide between what was public and private. e modern distinction between public and private office, which makes little enough sense today in relation to out-sourced government, makes even less in the pre-modern context. ere was no clear dividing line between public and private office in pre-modern Britain, as the state relied on private contractors (which it paid) to supply goods and services, and on private individuals (whom it o en did not pay) to do its work, as well as paying many state officials a small wage that they were expected to supplement by direct private payments in the form of fees, gratuities, and perquisites. Private investors came together in joint-stock companies, such as the EIC, that had public, legislative backing and in turn exercised state-like functions
