Modernity's Corruption: Empire and Morality in the Making of British India

Honorable Mention, 2024 Outstanding Published Book Award, Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity Section, American Sociological Association Honorable Mention, 2024 Allan Sharlin Memorial Book Award, Social Science History Association Today, "corruption" generally refers to pursuing personal interests at the expense of one's responsibilities, the law, or the common good. It calls to mind some official violating their public duty for private gain, suggesting seamy bureaucracies taking payoffs, kickbacks, and bribes. Yet at other times, notions of corruption were rooted in a more expansive view of the causes of people's behavior and the appropriate ways to regulate conduct. In this understanding, to be "corrupt" meant losing a delicate balance among competing appetites under specific circumstances and in the eyes of peers. Why did a narrower definition of corruption become dominant? Nicholas Hoover Wilson develops a new account of the changing category of corruption by examining the English East India Company and its transformation from a largely commercial enterprise to a militarized offshoot of British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He argues that the modern idea of corruption arose as an unintended consequence of conflicts among company officials and the changing audiences to which they justified themselves in Britain. This new understanding unified an imperial elite at risk of fragmenting into irreconcilable moral worlds and, in the process, helped redefine the boundaries of state, society, and economy. Modernity's Corruption is at once a novel historical sociology of imperial administration and its contradictions, a fresh argument about the nature of corruption and its political and organizational effects, and a reinvigoration of classic arguments about the nature and consequences of global modernity.

About the Author :
Nicholas Hoover Wilson is associate professor of sociology at Stony Brook University.

Review :
An instructive and attractively written study that is in many ways an exemplary work of historical sociology, -- "American Journal of Sociology" An exemplary work of historical sociology.-- "Sociology of Race and Ethnicity" What is 'corruption'? And what does it have to do with 'modernity'? In this carefully constructed and rigorously argued new book, Nicholas Hoover Wilson traces the historical genesis of modern-day understandings to internecine battles within the shapeshifting architectures of the British East India Company. An exemplary work of social science history.--Philip Gorski, Frederick and Laura Goff Professor, Yale University The book deserves a broad readership as a thoughtful and insightful contribution to our understanding of an organization that played such an important role in the making of the modern world. -- "European Legacy" Modernity's Corruption is model work of historical sociology. Wilson asks a wonderfully rich and puzzling question: Why were notions of corruption transformed from situational ones to more abstract and universal concepts? By focusing on the case of England's East India Company in the late eighteenth century, Wilson advances the claim that the transformation had everything to do with imperial governance, and the fact that ruling at a distance necessitated the implementation of more abstract and political economic standards. What makes Wilson's work so compelling is that these broad theoretical claims, claims that have implications for how we understand the development of moral claims more generally, are so carefully situated in a deep engagement with the archival and pamphlet literature of the era. Empire, in Wilson's hands, becomes a central engine of modernity.--Steve Pincus, author of 1688: The First Modern Revolution This book will generate a good deal of interest from historians as well as sociologists. It offers a perceptive study of the East India Company when it was frequently under fire for corruption. It persuasively argues that shock at self-interested behavior helped to promote a more 'modern, ' public duty-centered ideal for officials.--Mark Knights, author of Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire, 1600-1850 A brilliant dovetailing of theory and history, Modernity's Corruption is also a deeply generative work for social scientists who work in a broad range of areas--moralities of power, states and societies, and the politics of administration--pertinent to the present day.--Julia Adams, author of The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe This welcome study of corruption reflects on fundamental distinctions between public and private, abstract and particular, and on how standards of appropriateness emerge. Wilson grounds his analysis in careful research about the English East India Company, that famous organization from the early modern global economy. There is much here to think about.--Bruce G. Carruthers, author of The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power, and Credit in America