1st Edition

Corruption, Anti-Corruption, Vigilance, and State Building from Early to Late Modern Times

306 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

306 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

306 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

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... Read more

Foreword: A Commentary on Corruption and Control from the Perspective of the Cultures of Vigilance

Arndt Brendecke

Introduction. Corruption and the Modernisation of the State. A Short Introduction to a Long-term Process (1600–1900)

Ricard Torra-Prat and Joan Pubill-Brugués

Part 1: Blurred Lines: Conceptualising corruption in the early modern era and beyond

1. Defining Corruption in the Holy Roman Empire: The Gülich Revolt in Cologne and its Monument to Social Deviance

Peter Roethke

2. The Pietist Campaign against Corruption 1660–1700

Otto Ulbricht

3. The Perception of Corruption in Croatian Public Service in 17th and 18th Centuries: Tradition and Reform

Ivana Horbec

4. Conceptualising Corruption as a Systemic Issue in Premodern Britain

Mark Knights

Part 2: From Vigilance to Scandal. Performing Corruption and Anti-corruption

5. How to Harmonise Republican and Social Norms in an Aristocracy? Election and Corruption in the Republic of Venice (1500–1797)

Maud Harivel

6. Wielding a Many-Edged Sword: Constitutional Struggle, Political Modernisation, and the Ambiguity of Corruption Rhetoric in Early Modern Württemberg

Niels Grüne

7. A Complicit State? Discourses around Corruption and the Role of the State within the Context of Modern Colonial Empires: The Case of the Dutch Empire, c. 1850–1880s

Ronald Kroeze and Otto Linde

8. “To new revolutions”: Vigilance, Mistrust and Corruption in France under the July Monarchy (1830–1848)

Frédéric Monier

9. Gratifying Candidates and Rewarding Voters in Early Twentieth Century Romania: Electoral Practices and Strategies

Cosmin-Ștefan Dogaru

Part 3: The Divergent Routes towards Modernity

10. Context and Language About Corruption in the Early Modern Period

Pilar Ponce and Amorina Villarreal

11. Native Litigation, Contraband Trade, and a Corrupt Custiodian of Justice in Colonial Mexico, 1704–1721

Christoph Rosenmüller

12. The Naturalisation of Political Corruption in Spanish Literature: The Generation of 1868

Cristina Ramos-Cobano and Diego José Feria-Lorenzo

13. A National Culture of Corruption? Spain in Transnational Perspective (18th-19th Centuries)

Lluís Ferran Toledano and Gemma Rubí

14. Hopeless Corruption? Negotiating Modernity in Wallachia and Moldavia in the 1830s

Silvia Marton

15. Some Theses on the History of Corruption in the Modern Era

Jens Ivo Engels

Biography

Ricard Torra-Prat is a Beatriu de Pinós Postdoctoral Fellow at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He is the project leader of Political Corruption and Statebuilding in 18th Century Spanish Monarchy, and the author of “Francesc Eiximenis and the Catalan idea of corruption in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon” (2021).

Joan Pubill-Brugués is a Margarita Salas Postdoctoral Fellow at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and enseignant vacataire at the Université de Perpignan. He is the co-editor of Las sombras de la transparencia. Secreto, corrupción y "estado profundo" en la España contemporánea (2022).

Arndt Brendecke holds the Early Modern History Chair at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. He is the spokesperson of the SFB 1369 Vigilanzkulturen and the author of The empirical empire: Spanish colonial rule and the politics of knowledge (2016).