Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era: A Global Perspective 9789811602542, 9789811602559

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE GLOBAL HISTORY

Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era A Global Perspective

Edited by Ronald Kroeze Pol Dalmau · Frédéric Monier

Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History

Series Editors Manuel Perez-Garcia, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China Lucio De Sousa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo, Japan

This series proposes a new geography of Global History research using Asian and Western sources, welcoming quality research and engaging outstanding scholarship from China, Europe and the Americas. Promoting academic excellence and critical intellectual analysis, it offers a rich source of global history research in sub-continental areas of Europe, Asia (notably China, Japan and the Philippines) and the Americas and aims to help understand the divergences and convergences between East and West. Advisory Board Patrick O’Brien (London School of Economics) Anne McCants (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Joe McDermott (University of Cambridge) Pat Manning (Pittsburgh University) Mihoko Oka (University of Tokyo) Richard Von Glahn (University of California, Los Angeles) Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla (Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla) Shigeru Akita (Osaka University) François Gipouloux (CNRS/FMSH) Carlos Marichal (Colegio de Mexico) Leonard Blusse (Leiden University) Antonio Ibarra Romero (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, UNAM) Giorgio Riello (University of Warwick) Nakajima Gakusho (Kyushu University) Liu Beicheng (Tsinghua University) Li Qingxin (Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences) Dennis O. Flynn (University of the Pacific) J. B. Owens (Idaho State University)

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15711

Ronald Kroeze · Pol Dalmau · Frédéric Monier Editors

Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era A Global Perspective

Editors Ronald Kroeze Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Pol Dalmau Pompeu Fabra University Barcelona, Spain

Frédéric Monier University of Avignon Avignon, France

ISSN 2662-7965 ISSN 2662-7973 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History ISBN 978-981-16-0254-2 ISBN 978-981-16-0255-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Chapters 1, 5 and 7 are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapters. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

Retrospectively, the idea behind this volume developed over the years as we discussed the history of corruption, often in the rooms and corridors of conference venues that were organised as part of the different research projects we participated in. It became apparent to us that the topic of corruption in the context of colonial empires deserved more of our attention. To more systematically explore the topic and discuss it, also with scholars from outside our own networks, we organised the conference “The Corrupt Colony? Empire, Colonialism and Corruption 1800–present”, which was held at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam on January 22, 2019. At that conference, draft papers were discussed and explored that would form an important step towards the realisation of this volume. In the months thereafter, all contributors reworked their texts and a draft manuscript was sent to the publisher in the autumn of 2019. A second round of revisions followed based on the comments of anonymous external reviewers, as well as the editors of the Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History. After a final round of textual fine-tuning, the volume was ready for publication. We would not have come this far without the support of those that helped, inspired and advised us along the way, leading to the eventual publication of this volume. Therefore, we like to express our gratitude to different institutes and persons. Financial support from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Avignon University, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Clue+, the Research v

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Institute for History and Heritage of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, enabled us to organise the conference and to publish several contributions as open access. Moreover, we are grateful to all of the contributors, discussants and listeners who attended the conference in Amsterdam, to the members of the international network “Politics and Corruption: History and Sociology”, to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful remarks and for the advice of our colleagues at the various institutes we were affiliated with over the past few years. We would also like to thank Bel Parnell-Berry for editing the final texts, Palgrave and Connie Li for smoothening the process of publication, as well as Manuel Perez-Garcia and Luis de Sousa, the editors of the Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, whose enthusiasm for this volume from an early stage was a very important stimulant to continue our efforts. Amsterdam, The Netherlands Barcelona, Spain Avignon, France August 2020

Ronald Kroeze Pol Dalmau Frédéric Monier

Contents

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Introduction: Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era: Towards a Global Perspective Ronald Kroeze, Pol Dalmau, and Frédéric Monier

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Part I Corruption and Narratives of Imperial Decline and Reform During the Age of Revolutions, c. 1800 2

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4

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Reflections of an Early Modern Historian on the Modern History of Corruption and Empire Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla Corruption, Empire and State-Building: An Entangled History of the British and French “Imperial Nation States” and Hyderabad, c.1760–1800 Tanja Bührer The East India Company and the Regulation of Corruption in Early-Nineteenth-Century India Anubha Anushree Corrupt and Rapacious: Colonial Spanish-American Past Through the Eyes of Early Nineteenth-Century Contemporaries. A Contribution from the History of Emotions Moisés Prieto

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CONTENTS

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Bribery in Baroda: The Politics of Corruption in Nineteenth-Century India Mark Knights and Zak Leonard

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Part II Civilising Missions and “Oriental” Corruption During the Age of Modern Imperialism, c. 1900 7

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9

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Colonial Normativity? Corruption in the Dutch–Indonesian Relationship in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Ronald Kroeze Land, State and Favour in Colonial Algeria: Why the Bruat Case (1877) Did Not Become a Scandal Didier Guignard “There’s Nothing Like Having Good Influence in Madrid!”: Fraud and Immorality in Cuba, the “Pearl of the Antilles” Pol Dalmau “Putting an End to the Slander That Stains Everything”: Víctor Balaguer and Anti-Corruption Strategies in Late Nineteenth-Century Cuba Gemma Rubí Paperwork as Commodity, Corruption as Accumulation: Land Records and Licences in Colonial Myanmar, c.1900 Jonathan Saha

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The Entrenchment of Corruption in a Colonial Context: The Case of the Philippines, c. 1900 Xavier Huetz de Lemps

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Colonial and Corruption History: Conclusions and Future Research Perspectives Jens Ivo Engels and Frédéric Monier

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Index

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List of Contributors

Anubha Anushree Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Tanja Bührer University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland Pol Dalmau Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain Jens Ivo Engels Technische Germany

Universität

Darmstadt,

Darmstadt,

Didier Guignard IREMAM, CNRS - Université d’Aix Marseille, Marseille, France Xavier Huetz de Lemps Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France Mark Knights Warwick University, Coventry, England Ronald Kroeze Vrije Netherlands

Universiteit

Amsterdam,

Amsterdam,

The

Zak Leonard University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA Frédéric Monier University of Avignon, Avignon, France Moisés Prieto University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland Gemma Rubí PICEC-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Jonathan Saha University of Durham, Durham, UK Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain

List of Figures

Fig. 8.1

Fig. 8.2

Fig. 8.3

Picture 9.1

Picture 9.2

The “Bruet [i.e. Bruat] farm” on the 1:50.000 scale map (Document source: Institut géographique de France, sheet no. 43 entitled “Palestro”, 1958 edition last updated in 1936 with vines’ extension in scatter plots) The “arib [i.e. azib] ben Zoubir” on a 1:40.000 civil engineer plan, October 1876 (Document source: ANOM, DA, 4 M/241) The farm plot [“ferme”] with the Bruat name mentioned below on the 1:10.000 cadastral plan, August 1877 (Document source: ANOM, DA, 4 M/241) “La situació de Cuba,” La Campana de Gràcia, March 14, 1891, 4. In the footnote: “Sobre Cuba que naufraga un aligot s’hi cerneix… Espanyols, visquém alerta: «La Habana se va a perder!»” (“An eagle looms over a drowning Cuba. Spaniards, be aware: «Havana will be lost!»”) “Situació de Cuba,” La Campana de Gràcia, April 20, 1884, 4. In the footnote: “Brotan por todas partes gérmenes de prosperidad” (“The seeds of prosperity spring everywhere”)

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Introduction: Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era: Towards a Global Perspective Ronald Kroeze, Pol Dalmau, and Frédéric Monier

Scandal, corruption, exploitation and abuse of power have been linked to the history of modern empire-building. Colonial territories often became promised lands where individuals sought to make quick fortunes, sometimes in collaboration with the local population but more often at the expense of them. On some occasions, these shady dealings resulted in scandals that reached back to the metropolis, questioning civilising

R. Kroeze (B) Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] P. Dalmau Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] F. Monier University of Avignon, Avignon, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 R. Kroeze et al. (eds.), Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era, Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9_1

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discourses in parliaments and the press, and leading to reforms in colonial administrations. In spite of some valuable case studies and general essays on corruption and imperialism, historians have usually paid little systematic attention to these questions. This is not to say that colonial corruption is an overall neglected topic. The literature on colonialism refers to the issue of corruption as an element of colonial rule and the colonial economy.1 Such studies reveal the recurrent and sometimes systematic existence of corruption in a colonial context, and how varied it is defined and understood in different studies. There is also a series of contributions dedicated to case studies of corruption in a colonial setting. Examples are studies of the Warren Hastings scandal or corruption in colonial Burma (present-day Myanmar) and colonial Nigeria for the British case, as well as the role of corruption with regard to French Algeria, the Spanish Philippines or the decline of the Dutch East India Company.2 Moreover, important studies on the history of empire often mention corruption, for example, as one of the reasons for the fall or reform of certain imperial regimes.3 These accounts provide valuable insights as they point at the role of misuse of power and resources as part of the “politics of difference” of imperial rule, but barely reflect more in depth on the links between colonialism and corruption. In other words, corruption is treated more as a symptom (whether in colonial governance, the economy or the characteristics of an empire) than as a specific subject of enquiry. Recent years have also seen a series of new publications on the history of corruption in Europe. These studies have shown that corruption as an idea and discourse, as well as a practice, played an important role in the history of modern politics and state-building processes. These works have highlighted the complexity of corruption in the modern era, for example, that corrupt practices continued to exist even though “modern” elites proclaimed they had freed their regimes from them. Moreover, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, accusations and debates about corruption served to initiate reform or, simply, as a pretext to undermine old structures and representatives of the so-called “Ancien Régime”.4 Therefore, anticorruption campaigns could and were also used as political weapons, to get rid of opponents and to promote politicised institutional reforms.5 Additionally, several historians have argued that the understanding of corruption as well as the link between corruption and political reform entered a new phase somewhere towards the end of the eighteenth century. From that moment onwards, instead of simply being

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a word to be used for a great variety of deviations (sexual, moral, religious, administrative), corruption became more often defined in political terms as the misuse of public office or the general interest for private gain. Moreover, it became an absolutely non-tolerable phenomenon in the public arena. This does not mean, of course, that corruption ceased to exist; rather, corruption became a more serious and challenging problem in terms of political legitimacy.6 As a result, a new political discourse developed in which corruption was portrayed as a remnant of “traditional” societies—in which “Ancien Régime” practices such as patronage and clientelism were rampant—that could be eliminated if the appropriate “modern” reforms were adopted. Although, there is still debate among historians about how sharp the break with the past really was7 —see also the contribution to this volume by Jens Ivo Engels and Frédéric Monier—these insights that have been framed in the context of European history can bring valuable perspectives to the history of colonialism and empire. For example, it can help us to locate the development and consequences of the idea that corruption was a problem of traditional regimes and that it belonged to a geographical “Other”: the colony and its local culture and inhabitants. This argument was used by European colonial elites in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to justify colonial rule: it was legitimate as it would end corruption and bring modernity, so it was argued. Indeed, if corruption had already been present in the Enlightenment’s idea of “Oriental despotism”, it now became part of the civilising discourse of nineteenth-century European colonialism.8 As such, the study of colonial corruption allows the tackling of historiographical debates about the ideological fundaments of civilising discourses, modernisation programs and the legitimacy of colonial rule, which is an important theme in the history of colonialism (as well as in postcolonial and decolonisation studies, too).9 Methodologically, this volume takes inspiration from the latest stream of publications about the history of corruption as well. These studies have underlined the importance of a contextual approach that understands corruption, not as something fixed and universal. Indeed, corruption is by its very (linguistic) meaning, disapproved as an immoral phenomenon, and corruption in modern history is often about a form of misuse of public resources for private or group gain, but the real meaning of “immoral”, “misuse”, “public resources” and “private gain”, differs over time and place. One needs to analyse specific cases, scandals and debates, to understand corruption more precisely. This approach has proved highly

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valuable and has opened up new lines of research. In countries such as Germany, France and the Netherlands, scholars have devoted growing attention to a topic that had little tradition in the respective national historiographies.10 In other cases, such as those of Southern Europe and Latin America, traditional narratives that linked corruption with backwardness in historical development have been replaced by new research questions and methods. Examples of these are the interest to trace the changing meanings of corruption in periods of transition, the eruption of scandals in the public sphere or the measures to curtail corruption practices.11 The outcome of these new publications has been a renewed and thriving historiography that has benefitted from the creation of new international collaborative research teams. While these developments have decisively contributed to renewing the field, to the point that we can speak of a “new history of corruption”, the nation-state has remained the predominant framework of reference. Moreover, most research questions have been posed from a European perspective. This book is a first attempt, instead of a final analysis, to discuss the topic of corruption, empire and colonialism in a systematic manner and from a global comparative perspective. It does so through a set of original studies that examines 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. Readers interested in colonialism will find in this book a wide array of studies that examine the changing contours of corruption and the different responses that empires designed to confront it. Against the temptation of seeing colonial rule as being permanent and stable, corruption sheds light on periods of crisis and reform, pointing at crucial moments when imperial rule was called into question or redesigned. Corruption can thus be seen as an important characteristic of colonial rule as well as a catalyst for reform in the modern era, a phenomenon that illuminates the strategies that empires put forward in order to cope with historical change. In parallel to this, the emphasis on the links between colony and metropolis allows for opening up new perspectives of analysis in a traditionally state-driven historiography, and to unveil new spatial units of analysis, such as Atlantic and—above all—global history that have not yet been applied to the history of corruption.

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Coherence and Approach The volume offers a variety of case studies, touching on the history of four different empires and their possessions in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. Coherence is provided, first of all, by the overall contextual approach of corruption—a method that has been applied in the most recent historiography on the topic, as discussed above. A contextual approach is important to find out the precise meanings: corruption has to be examined and explained through the very specific times and places where it was debated. Thus, the volume discusses examples of corruption and debates about how they were understood within the different time frames and geographical colonial settings of the moment, providing a variety of understandings of the roles corruption played. As will become clear, at times corruption was mainly about immoral forms of economic exploitation, while in other circumstances illegitimate forms of political or cultural dominance were at the heart of scandals and debates. Second, coherence is provided by an overarching global comparative approach. Such standing is informed by the general literature on the history of empires from a global perspective,12 including the books already published in the same book series as this volume.13 Although there are many and not always coinciding understandings of global history, it can generally be defined on the basis of three elements. A global perspective seeks to explain the complexity of historical phenomena through the comparison between different parts of the world, but is also compatible with the interest to highlight the interconnections between these parts. This approach does not necessarily seek to write a “total history” of the whole planet, nor to merge all historical accounts into one single metanarrative. Rather, it seeks to break with the separate compartments that have traditionally characterised the writing of history by emphasising the similarities and the differences between diverse territories, cultures and societies, as well as by illuminating the connections that intertwined them.14 A second aim of using a global history perspective is to challenge “traditional and sometimes obsolete national narratives”.15 In the field of corruption, one could think of narratives that recurrently present corruption as being particularly present in certain empires (such as the “backward” Spanish, Portuguese and Ottoman empires), while supposedly being less present in other ones. Often, however, the historical situation was more complicated—corruption was a phenomenon present in all empires, but manifested and changed across time in many different

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forms. Moreover, scholars in the past—including historians—helped to construct these stereotypical images and “black legends” for political, imperial and nationalist reasons.16 A third related fundamental aim in the writing of global history is to challenge Western-centred master narratives by adding a new plurality of voices, sources and subaltern actors into historical analysis.17 In practical terms, these theoretical assumptions and aims informed the authors of this volume to understand corruption as a problem inherent to the history of all empires, instead of a problem specific to supposedly “Southern”, decrepit or decaying ones. Indeed, the four empires covered in this book (British, French, Spanish and Dutch) possessed a long experience of colonial rule, which in some cases stretched back to early modern times. When corruption was perceived as a recurring or systemic problem, it often led to moments of crisis and political conflict, that resulted in debates in the public sphere about normative values and the necessity of reform. On some occasions, the outcome was the implementation of legal and political programs that sought to re-design the foundations of empire, both in terms of legitimacy and practical rule. In some other cases, however, corruption served as a powerful pretext to justify the need to “civilise” indigenous societies, as Nicholas B. Dirks has shown for the case of the British empire.18 The study of corruption thus brings dynamism to the history of empire, stressing contingency and change, while contributing to explain why they have been one of the most enduring political entities in world history. Taken together, the four empires covered in this book, alongside the colonies they possessed in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, reveal how pervasive corruption was at the time, in addition to how different it was depending on where and when it took place. The focus on a wide number of cases allows the grappling of these two dimensions that are inherent to corruption. Namely, its universality as a problem common to all empires, as well as its complexity as a multi-layered phenomenon that was time and place dependent. Only a comparison between empires can serve as a safeguard against simplistic generalisations, which take a handful cases to draw shallow (and often ahistorical) conclusions,19 and at the same time move beyond the exceptionalism of nation-centred approaches. For these reasons, all of the authors in this book emphasise transnational connections. Additionally, they make an effort to place their own case study and research questions in relation to other ones. Furthermore, although of course more sources and perspectives could have been included, the

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outcome is—as we hope—a cohesive volume with cross-references in each chapter that challenge nation-centred approaches, and which when taken together provide a global outlook.20 Structure of the Volume Although the chapters represent differences in approach that are mainly the result of the fact that the authors come from different fields and historiographical traditions, they all subscribe to the benefits of (a) challenging the European nation-state as the traditional frame to research the history of corruption; (b) a methodological approach that is characterised by a contextual understanding of corruption and (c) cross-referencing by linking different colonial settings in order to provide a global perspective. In total, the volume consists of eleven chapters—and a concluding chapter at the end—that are ordered more or less chronologically, focusing on a period that covers the end of the eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth century. This period in history, famously referred to as the “birth of the modern world”, was an era in which large empires were formed and cemented, and where new ideas of human development (such as those about civilisation and progress) were developed and used to legitimise the hierarchical subordination of races and cultures across the globe.21 In practice, however, the purpose of bringing “civilisation” to the new colonies often proved to be a much more difficult goal to achieve. Imperial powers did not only have to impose their control over immense extensions of territory, but also faced the challenge of subjecting widely heterogeneous populations. Furthermore, in such attempts they had to rely on a very limited number of imperial agents that on repeated occasions took advantage of their position, and of their distance from the metropolis, to make illicit gains. Cases of corruption, and how they were debated and managed both in the colony and the metropolis, therefore allow the examination of the forms of governance and tensions that were at the core of imperial rule. Informed by this and by the earlier introduced historiographical trends, we have structured the contributions to this book in two parts. The contributions of Part I—Corruption and Narratives of Imperial Decline and Reform During the Age of Revolutions, c. 1800—discuss corruption as a problem for all empires in the decades around 1800, which was a period of global revolutions and major reforms. Contemporaries of the last decades of the eighteenth and first decades of the nineteenth centuries era often saw colonial corruption as a major reason

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for the declining power or economic failure of “their” empires, as was clearly apparent in the debates about the decline of the Spanish and the Dutch Republican VOC-empire. This discourse, however, was also very present in the case of the British and French empires. Colonial scandals and debates about corruption in the colony served to criticise the old regime and to initiate change in persons and structures. The historian Lauren Benton, for instance, has recently highlighted the importance that the scandals of this period had in reshaping the legal fundaments of the British empire.22 Reflecting on the role of corruption in these empires from different geographical perspectives, therefore, appears as an untapped subject. Additionally, there is the need to re-examine the role that corruption played in the creation of national stereotypes (e.g. “Black Legends” in the Spanish case), attributing to a stereotypical image of decaying corrupt empires and reforming modern empires. The contributions of Part II—Civilising Missions and “Oriental” Corruption During the Age of Modern Imperialism, c. 1900—focus on corruption in the decades around 1900, a period of extending the spheres of state power in different regions a process that was justified by the “civilising discourses”. Cultural and moral arguments were central elements in justifying the seizure of new lands and the extraction of resources.23 Several contributions show that corruption was a recurring element in the genesis, or in the reshaping, of civilising discourses around the year 1900. In some occasions, it was the supposed corrupt nature of indigenous peoples that featured prominently behind the ideologies of modern imperialism, while in others it was the shady dealings of colonial bureaucrats and modern entrepreneurs that justified the need for new ethical fundaments in ruling the colonies. The recurring and multifaceted presence of corruption in civilising discourses and in debates on the colonies, and their roles in reinforcing notions of “bringing modernity” and processes of “Otherness”, are dimensions that the different chapters address as well.

I. Corruption and Narratives of Imperial Decline and Reform During the Age of Revolutions, c. 1800 More precisely, Part I comprises five chapters focusing on corruption and narratives of imperial decline and reform during the Age of Revolutions. In this age, corruption was understood as a problem concerning how overseas trade, imperial politics and economics worked. It was also the

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period of the birth of a more modern concept of corruption, with an emphasis on understanding corruption as a problem of the mixing up of the public and the private, politics and economics, individual and general interests. According to the modern ideal, these should be separated as much as possible. The contributions of this part deal with corruption caused by tensions between these sectors, as well as the narratives about declining old empires and the necessity of reform. Informed by these issues, Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla provides a long-term perspective by looking at the role of corruption in early modern empires. In contrast to traditional narratives that portrayed Iberian empires as obsolete entities that were particularly prone to corruption, he shows that the reality was far more complex. Next to the study of formal institutions, Yun-Casalilla emphasises the need to focus on informal institutions (such as the family and kinship relations), the role of space and the negotiated nature of power, in order to understand a phenomenon that was not yet referred to as “corruption” at the time. All of these reflections illuminate the long history of corruption in the colonies and serve as a valuable reminder against teleological narratives that view the fight against corruption as a sign of modernity. Chapter 3 by Tanja Bührer, examines the impeachment of the first Governor General of the British East India Company, Warren Hastings, in February 1788. This contribution aims to explain why, disregarding a long-standing argument against “old corruption” in domestic administration and politics, a case of colonial corruption became the most spectacular public scandal in this crucial period of transition from premodern to modern times. For a better understanding of the empire’s return home in scandal’s guise, a multi-perspective approach of the customary separated fields of national and imperial history, as well as area studies, is applied. Bührer provides an entangled history of the British and French “Imperial Nation-States” and the South Indian “Princely State” Hyderabad. She argues that the specific metropolitan anxieties regarding colonial corruption were caused by its emergence from AngloIndian cross-cultural and Anglo-French inter-imperial interactions on the margins of the empire. These “alien” influences sharpened the awareness of presumably national concepts of good governance back home, and caused anticorruption interventions that went ahead of the domestic reforms. In chapter 4, Anubha Anushree discusses attempts to regulate corruption by the British East India Company. She argues that by the beginning of the second decade of the nineteenth century, the East India

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Company started projecting corruption as an anomalous and temporary phenomenon that allowed it to formulate a collective and systemic paternal morality. The chapter first focuses on two crucial interlocutors of the first half of the nineteenth century—Thomas Babington Macaulay and William Bentinck—to situate the correspondence between an ascendant governmental moralism and corruption. She then continues by examining several understudied instances of corruption—namely, the cases of Thomas Metcalfe, Mordaunt Ricketts and Edward Colebrook—in order to examine how the early-nineteenth-century discourse of colonial corruption was constituted by a double strategy. On the one hand, corruption came to be increasingly “investigated” and re-described as a financial disorder, whereby the British were presented as “supine” and “passive”. On the other hand, the investigations often sought to incriminate Indians and their relationships with these officers. The focus on finances and Indians allowed the British to contain the discourse of corruption, even as the term expanded to discipline a variety of official and quasi-official relationships between the British and the Indians that did not fit the normative character of the nineteenth-century public office. Chapter 5 by Moisés Prieto, discusses America’s “second discovery” in the early-nineteenth century. Inspired by Alexander von Humboldt, merchants, travellers, scientists and adventurers travelled through Latin America with different purposes. Their documents were not only supposed to provide mere entertainment or knowledge about local customs, flora and fauna, but contained historical essays on the recent past of those former colonies as well. Nepotism, favouritism, misappropriation, bribery and arbitrariness were witnessed by those travellers who tried to explain these phenomena in different ways. Prieto argues that colonial corruption should be understood in relation to the history of colonial rule—the distance from the motherland offered opportunities—although officeholders’ passions, vices and pursuits of prestige were as important. After emancipation, the second aspect remained but understandings of corruption were further influenced by a new rationalistic view, typical for the Enlightenment and positivism that linked the absence of corruption to (an idea of) progress and vice versa. In chapter 6, Mark Knights and Zak Leonard discuss two nineteenthcentury cases in the Gujarati princely state of Baroda that shed light on the politics of corruption. The first, running from the mid-1830s to mid-1850s, centred on allegations about the corrupt influence (known as “khutput”) of a native clique on the East Indian Company hierarchy; the

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second, in 1893–1895, turned on allegations against Vasudev Sadashew Bapat, an allegedly corrupt official in a department dealing with sensitive land revenue issues. The authors show that the responses by the British authorities were different in the two cases. In the first, the Bombay hierarchy proved very resistant to challenging khutput despite the vigorous investigatory efforts of one of its own officials, James Outram. In the second, the British authorities were keen to intervene and brought the matter to trial. These differing approaches were nevertheless united by a common desire to maintain maximum influence over the nominally independent state.

II. Civilising Missions and “Oriental” Corruption During the Age of Modern Imperialism, c. 1900 Continuing the reflection on cases of colonial corruption in the decades around 1800 that are discussed in Part I, the six contributions of Part II shift their perspectives to the last decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries—the era of modern imperialism and the civilising missions. Ronald Kroeze relates debates of around 1800 to those of around 1900. Kroeze takes the Dutch-Indonesian histories of colonial state formation as a common base to define and test several hypotheses that are informed by debates in the historiography of corruption and (post-)colonialism. One is that corruption is never a neutral objective term and that when it is used in a colonial context it serves to set or challenge norms that underlay colonial power structures. Indeed, the Dutch-Indonesian case shows evidence of the link between corruption and the context of establishing a colonial empire: by both invoking scandals and asking for reform, as well as neglecting or denying corruption in other instances, elites (re)formulated norms in order to set or maintain power structures of colonial state-formation and economic exploitation. Kroeze also argues that cases of colonial corruption show how the metropole and colony were interlinked and influenced each other. For instance, political changes in the metropole, such as the growing influence of more morally outspoken Protestant and Liberal politicians, as well as experiences of misuse in the colony, together caused the emergence of the Dutch equivalent of the civilising mission: the “Ethical Policy”. Despite these connections, corruption and moral campaigns against it, often served to strengthen already existing differences and dissimilarities.

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Part II then continues with chapter 8, in which Didier Guignard focuses on a specific case of colonial corruption in the context of French Algeria: the Bruat case of 1877. He explains how Algerian rural society was exposed to land confiscations during the nineteenth century; the Bruat case shows how public agents and European politicians took advantage of their front-row seat in order to seize land for their own interests or for cronyism. More precisely, this contribution provides a micro-level analysis of the awarding of 100 hectares of land to a civil servant in Low Kabylia during the 1870s. As a member of the upper class in France, the mother of this civil servant played the role of mediator in negotiations with central authorities to “help” them bypassing legal interdictions. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the usefulness of the concept of colonial corruption. In chapter 9, Pol Dalmau examines the deep-rooted presence of corruption in Spain’s most prosperous colony in the Caribbean: Cuba. He shows how the booming economy of this sugar island in the global market ran parallel to a wide range of fraudulent practices that touched virtually all the levels of the colonial administration. Dalmau does not only provide evidence of this, but also argues that colonial corruption had an Atlantic dimension that can only be fully understood by examining the clientelistic networks that spanned the two sides of the Atlantic, and through an analytical approach that examines the metropolis and colony together. Hence, the chapter shows how Cuban elites made use of novels and other methods of political action to denounce corrupt practices back in the metropolis. Authorities in Madrid, however, often turned a deaf ear to these reports and considered that corruption was a minor price to be paid (and quite often, to benefit from) in order to maintain the integrity of the Spanish empire. The analysis of corruption in Cuba is thus used as a platform from which to examine the Atlantic dynamics of imperial rule, as well as the tensions and resistances that pervaded it. Gemma Rubí, in chapter 10, continues with the topic of corruption in Cuba, but focuses on Victor Balaguer—Spain’s Minister of Overseas Affairs in different periods (1871, 1874 and 1886–1888). The fight against corruption carried out by public employees was a constant in the political career of Balaguer. From the Court of Auditors and from the Debt Inspection Commission, he devoted considerable efforts to pursuing it. Upon access to the position of Overseas Affairs’ Minister, Balaguer ran into several powerful irregularities practiced by civil servants of the colonial administration in Cuba, which came to be the continuation

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of those that he had already found during his previous mandates. Rubí’s contribution thus draws on the case of a reputed politician, in order to examine the motivations to fight political corruption in the colonies and the measures that were developed in such attempts. In chapter 11, Jonathan Saha focuses on paperwork as a source of corruption in colonial Myanmar (formerly Burma) around 1900. He argues that the bureaucratic paperwork produced by colonial states was often embroiled in malfeasant practices. Take, for example, the paperwork that was used to regulate fishing in colonial Myanmar from the late-nineteenth century onwards. Certain littoral areas and deltaic waterways were designated as fisheries. Individuals could bid for leases to these fisheries in auctions. In non-leased open fisheries, people had to apply for licenses to fish. In addition, to mitigate against overfishing, licenses were required for the use of nets. However, the prescriptive nature of these documents did not always have the effects that they were intended to have. This chapter argues that by considering paperwork to be a particular type of commodity, we can better understand the prevalence of particular corrupt practices in the colonial context. Xavier Huetz de Lemps, in the last contribution of Part II, takes contemporary discussions about the colonial roots of today’s corruption as a starting point for an analysis of the role of corruption in the Philippines in the decades around 1900. He argues that corruption in post-colonial Philippines is deeply rooted in the long colonial history of the archipelago, but that this is less a matter of showing that corruption is a very ancient local phenomenon and more about understanding the reasons why corrupt practices passed from one political system to the other. During the Spanish period, embezzlement and abuse of power became unremarkable behaviours for Spanish civil servants and their Philippine subordinates. Beginning in 1898, the Americans gradually endowed the colony with modern democratic institutions. Yet, the US imperial contradictions and the skill of the Philippine political elites allowed the corruption to remain and to pervert the new institutions. The final contribution to this volume is written by Jens Ivo Engels and Frédéric Monier, which should be read more as a reflection and an agenda for further research, than as a summary of each contribution. Engels and Monier challenge the reader by highlighting the role of lasting systems of gifts and patronage, and emphasise the influence of conflicting norms and political changes for the rise (and absences) of debates about colonial corruption in one context, but not in another. They, like other

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contributors did, stress the point not to treat “colonial corruption” as only about—and taking place in—the colony.

Notes 1. For example, for the Dutch-Indonesian case Jan Luiten van Zanden and Daan Marks pointed to corruption and other “extractive institutions” in their An Economic History of Indonesia of Indonesia 1800–2010 (London: Routledge, 2012), 30, 31, 72, 107 and 113; Ewout Frankema and Frans Buelens, Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development. The Belgian Congo and the Netherlands Indies Compared (London: Routledge, 2013), 122–124. 2. Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire. India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Xavier Huetz de Lemps, L’archipel des épices. La corruption de l’administration espagnole aux Philipinnes (fin XVIIIe-fin XIXe siècle) (Madrid: Casa Velázquez, 2006); Didier Guignard, L’abus de pouvoir en Algérie coloniale (1880–1914). Visibilité et singularité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2010); Chris Nierstrasz, In the shadow of the Company: The Dutch East India Company and Its Servants in the Period of Its Decline, 1740– 1796 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Jonathan Saha, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State: Corruption in Burma c.1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Another example is Steven Pierce, “Looking Like a State: Colonialism and the Discourse of Corruption in Northern Nigeria,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 4 (2006): 887–914. 3. For example: C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World. Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004) who refers to the role of “old corruption” (p. 98) and “moral corruption” (p. 101), which he links to the “old order” and the “politics of difference”; Burbank and Cooper also, every now and then, point at the role of corruption in the history of empires as shown in Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History. Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 4. Cesare Mattina, Frédéric Monier, Olivier Dard and Jens Ivo Engels, eds., Dénoncer la corruption. Chevaliers blancs, pamphlétaires et promoteurs de la transaprence à l’époque contemporaine (Paris: Demopolis, 2018). 5. Jens Ivo Engels, “Corruption and Anticorruption in the Era of Modernity and Beyond,” in Anticorruption in History. From Antiquity to the Modern Era, eds. Ronald Kroeze, André Vitoria and Guy Geltner (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2018); Pol Dalmau, “Fighting Against Corruption. Newspapers and Public Morality in Modern Spain,” in Scandales

1

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

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et corruption politique à l’époque contemporaine (XIXe-XXe siècles), eds. Frédéric Monier and Jens Ivo Engels (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014), 31–50. See Jens Ivo Engels, Die Geschichte der Korruption. Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 2014). See Ronald Kroeze, Vitoria, Geltner, “Introduction: Debating Corruption and Anticorruption in History,” in Anticorruption in History. From Antiquity to the Modern Era, eds. Ronald Kroeze, André Vitoria and Guy Geltner (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2018), 1–17. On the Enlightenment and the notion of “Oriental” despotism, see: Joan Pau-Rubiés, “Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu,” Journal of Early Modern History 9, nos. 1–2 (January 2005): 109–190. For an example of a study that examines the role of colonialism, decolonisation processes and “modernity”, see Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). On the language of civilisation, see: Brett Bowden, The Empire ofcivilisation: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civiliser of Nations. The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Examples include: Kroeze, Vitoria and Geltner, Anticorruption in History; Engels, Die Geschichte der Korruption; F. Monier, O. Dard and A. Fahrmeir, eds., Scandales et Corruption. Christopher Rosenmüller and Stephan Ruderer, eds., Dádivas, dones y dineros. Aportes a una nueva historia de la corrupción en América Latina desde el Imperio español a la modernidad (Madrid: Iberoamericana Verveurt, 2016); Borja de Riquer, Joan Lluís Pérez Francesc, Gemma Rubí, Lluís Ferran Toledano and Oriol Luján, eds., La corrupción política en la España contemporánea. Un enfoque interdisciplinar (Barcelona: Marcial Pons, 2018); Pol Dalmau and Isabel Burdiel, eds., La imagen pública del poder. Escándalos y causas célebres en Europa (siglos XIX-XX), Historia y Política, 39, 2018 (special issue). John Darwin, After Tamerlane: the Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008); Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History. Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Peter Crooks and Timothy Parsons, eds., Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From the Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Manuel Pérez Garcia and Lucio De Sousa, eds., Global History and New Polycentric Approaches: Europe, Asia and the Americas in a World Network System (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla,

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14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe, 1415–1668 (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1; Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 67– 70; Richard Drayton and David Motadel, “Discussion: The Futures of Global History,” Journal of Global History 13, no. 1 (March 2018): 3. Manuel Pérez García, “Introduction: Current Challenges of Global History in East Asian Historiographies,” in Global History and New Polycentric Approaches: Europe, Asia and the Americas in a World Network System, eds. Manuel Pérez García and Lucio De Sousa (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 2; Jorge Luengo and Pol Dalmau, “Writing Spanish History in the Global Age,” Journal of Global History 13, no. 3 (November 2018): 425–445. For the case of the Spanish Empire, see: Richard Kagan, “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the decline of Spain,” American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (April 1996): 423–46; For that of the Ottoman, Aslı Çırakman, From the “Terror of the World” to the “Sick Man of Europe”. European Images of the Ottoman Empire and Society from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth (New York: Peter Lang, 2002). Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Dominic Sachsenmaier, “Global History and Critiques of Western Perspectives,” Comparative Education 42, no. 3 (August 2006): 451–470. Dirks, Scandal of Empire. Alan L. Karras, Smuggling. Contraband and Corruption in World History (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010). Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds., Global History, Globally: Research and Practice Around the World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World; Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire and the Idea of Human Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Lauren Benton, Rage for Order. The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). McCarthy, Race, Empire and the Idea; Martin Thomas and Richard Toye, Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882– 1956 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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References Bayly, Christopher, A. The Birth of the Modern World. Global Connections and Comparisons. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Beckert, Sven, and Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds. Global History, Globally: Research and Practice Around the World. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Benton, Lauren. Rage for Order. The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. Bowden, Brett. The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Burbank, Jane, and Frederick Cooper. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Çırakman, Aslı. From the “Terror of the World” to the “Sick Man of Europe”. European Images of the Ottoman Empire and Society from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question. Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2005. Conrad, Sebastian. What Is Global History? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Crooks, Peter, and Timothy Parsons, eds. Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From the Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Dalmau, Pol. “Fighting Against Corruption. Newspapers and Public Morality in Modern Spain.” In Scandales et corruption politique à l’époque contemporaine (XIXe-XXe siècles), edited by Frédéric Monier and Jens Ivo Engels, 31–50. Paris: Armand Colin, 2014. Dalmau, Pol, and Isabel Burdiel, eds. La imagen pública del poder. Escándalos y causas célebres en Europa (siglos XIX-XX), Historia y Política, 39, 2018 (special issue). Darwin, John. After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008. Dirks, Nicolas B. The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Drayton, Richard, and David Motadel. “Discussion: The Futures of Global History.” Journal of Global History 13, no. 1 (March 2018): 1–21. Engels, Jens Ivo. Die Geschichte der Korruption.Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis 20 Jahrhundert. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2014. Engels, Jens Ivo. “Corruption and Anticorruption in the Era of Modernity and Beyond.” In Anticorruption in History. From Antiquity to the Modern Era, edited by Ronald Kroeze, André Vitoria and Guy Geltner, 167–180. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

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Frankema, Ewout, and Frans Buelens. Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development. The Belgian Congo and the Netherlands Indies Compared. London: Routledge, 2013. Huetz de Lemps, Xavier. L’archipel des épices. La corruption de l’administration espagnole aux Philipinnes (fin XVIIIe-fin XIXe siècle). Madrid: Casa Velázquez, 2006. Kagan, Richard. “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain.” American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (April 1996): 423– 446. Karras, Alan L. Smuggling. Contraband and Corruption in World History. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010. Koskenniemi, Martti. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations. The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Kroeze, Ronald, Andre Vitória, and Guy Geltner, eds. Anticorruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Kroeze, Ronald, André Vitoria, and Guy Geltner, “Introduction: Debating Corruption and Anticorruption in History.” In Anticorruption in History. From Antiquity to the Modern Era, edited by Ronald Kroeze, André Vitoria and Guy Geltner, 1–17. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2018. Luengo, Jorge, and Pol Dalmau. “Writing Spanish History in the Global Age.” Journal of Global History 13, no. 3 (November 2018), 425–445. Mattina, Cesare, Frédéric Monier, Olivier Dard, and Jens Ivo Engels, eds. Dénoncer la corruption: Chevaliers blancs, pamphlétaires et promoteurs de la transparence àl’époque contemporaine. Paris: Demopolis, 2018. McCarthy, Thomas. Race, Empire and the Idea of Human Development. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Monier, Frédéric, Oliver Dard, and Andreas Fahrmeir, eds. Scandales et corruption à l’époque contemporaine. Paris: Armand Colin, 2014. Niertrasz, Chris. In the Shadow of the Company: The Dutch East India Company and Its Servants in the Period of Its Decline 1740–1796. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Pau-Rubiés, Joan. “Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu.” Journal of Early Modern History 9, nos. 1–2 (January 2005): 109–190. Pierce, Steven. “Looking Like a State: Colonialism and the Discourse of Corruption in Northern Nigeria.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 4 (2006): 887–914. Pérez García, Manuel. “Introduction: Current Challenges of Global History in East Asian Historiographies.” In Global History and New Polycentric Approaches: Europe, Asia and the Americas in a World Network System, edited by Manuel Pérez García and Lucio De Sousa. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

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Pérez Garcia, Manuel, and Lucio De Sousa, eds. Global History and New Polycentric Approaches Europe, Asia and the Americas in a World Network System. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Riquer, Borja de, Joan Lluís Pérez Francesc, Gemma Rubí, Lluís Ferran Toledano, and Oriol Luján, eds. La corrupción política en la España contemporánea. Un enfoque interdisciplinar. Barcelona: Marcial Pons, 2018. Sachsenmaier, Dominic. “Global History and Critiques of Western Perspectives.” Comparative Education 42, no. 3 (August 2006): 451–470. Saha, Jonathan. Law, Disorder and the Colonial State. Corruption in Burma ca. 1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Thomas, Martin, and Richard Toye. Arguing About Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882–1956. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Yun-Casalilla, Bartolomé. Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe, 1415–1668. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Zanden, Jan Luiten van, and Daan Marks. An Economic History of Indonesia 1800–2010. London: Routledge, 2012.

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

PART I

Corruption and Narratives of Imperial Decline and Reform During the Age of Revolutions, c. 1800

CHAPTER 2

Reflections of an Early Modern Historian on the Modern History of Corruption and Empire Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla

Throughout this chapter, I would like to develop a series of ideas on how the study of corruption in the early modern Spanish empire—and by extension elsewhere—can be used for the analysis of this phenomenon in the nineteenth century. I am particularly interested in considering how

The first version of this chapter was the keynote given by its author entitled: “The Early Modern Spanish Empire and the History of Corruption” at the meeting The corrupt colony: empire, colonialism and corruption: 1800–present, held in Amsterdam on 22 January 2019, under the coordination and direction of Pol Dalmau and Ronald Kroeze. I wish to thank both of them, as well as the rest of my colleagues, for their very valuable comments. There is a much shorter Spanish version that was published in Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, “El imperio español en la época moderna y la historia reciente de la corrupción en el siglo XIX,” in Bajo el velo del bien público. Estudios en homenaje a Guillermo Pérez Carrión, eds. Jesús B. Yun-Casalilla (B) Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Kroeze et al. (eds.), Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era, Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9_2

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recent approaches to the latter period can be illuminated by analyses of the sixteenth to eighteenth century European imperial formations. It is highly probable, however, that one of the consequences of this chapter might prove to be paradoxical. I refer to the fact that if, on the one hand, we cannot establish too rigid a barrier in 1800 when it comes to differentiating between forms of imperial corruption, it is equally true that, on the other hand, we have to recognise that around those years a change in the forms of imperialism was taking place making a “before and after” in the history of empires and corruption, particularly in the case of empires whose main centres were in Europe. As I will suggest, it is likely that this change stems not from the modernity that supposedly comes with the liberal and market economy system—as is sometimes alleged—but from the transformations and confrontations over power, taking place within European political formations from the eighteenth century onwards. That is, specifically, within imperial systems of mercantilist aspirations, where the consolidation of an increasingly centralised state power was becoming more necessary. This was, of course, regardless of the fact that this power continued to have high negotiating levels—an aspect that I will not enter into here. The Spanish empire has often been considered an extreme case of corruption. It has also been considered an example of how corruption had a perverse effect both in economic terms—a hindrance to the development of capitalism—and in political terms—an obstacle to the process of state-building. This has been made clear in studies by historians such as van Kleveren, Haring and more recently Pietschmann, as well as in a book published not long ago by Rosenmüller and Ruderer.1 The presence of corruption and its critique is also evident in the works of the writers of the Spanish Enlightenment, as well as in thinkers such as William Robertson and Adam Smith. The former, for example, understood that “a spirit of

Astigarraga and Javier Usoz (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2020), 171–184. The research for this chapter has been carried out within the framework of the FEDER research group UPO-1264973 “In search for the Atlantic aristocracies. Latin America and the peninsular Spanish elites, 1492-1824” PI, Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, and also of the PAIDI research group HUM 1000 “The History of globalization: violence, negotiation and interculturality”, of which the principal investigator is Professor Igor Pérez Tostado. Both projects are financed by the Regional Government of Andalusia. I wish to thank also Penny Eades for her translation of this text.

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corruption has infected all the colonies of Spain in America. Men far removed from the seat of government; impatient to acquire wealth, that they may return speedily from what they are apt to consider as a state of exile in a remote unhealthful country allured by opportunities too tempting to be resisted, and seduced by the example of those around them; find their sentiments of honour and of duty gradually relax”.2 Robertson also stressed the tension between the personal luxury of these corrupt men and the interest of their “sovereign” and of their “country”. Adam Smith, for his part, devoted some of his most lucid pages to the issue of contraband in the Portuguese and Spanish empires, and in particular to silver smuggling, in which the Spanish authorities themselves were often involved.3 Corruption, the idea of a corrupt empire, was thus very present among the writers of modern times, although it is also true that sometimes they used other terminology: injustice, venality, bad government and even inefficiency. Jeremiah Bentham himself understood corruption as the deterioration of the moral laws of politics and justice, rather than as something related to administration; at least this is true in his famous “Emancipate your colonies”.4 In any case, let us not forget that these thinkers extended their investigations of the issue to other empires. Thus, some of Adam Smith’s most lucid pages on smuggling are devoted to the English situation. In them, he tries to draw attention to the fact that monopolies and excessive taxes on customs are the fundamental origin of this phenomenon.5 Nor should it be forgotten that current historiography has also focused attention on the presence of corruption in other political formations and empires, such as the Dutch. For this case, Julia Adams examined the corrupt practices and nepotism within the hierarchy of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) and how they affected its internal management.6 In Great Britain, studies such as that of Emma Rothschild revealed that many forms of corruption, although not always described as such, were the basis for a successful fortune and political career, for instance that of the Johnstone family in the eighteenth century, despite condemnations received from India in this regard.7 Additionally, it is indeed ironic—and befitting the cynicism of corrupt characters—that the great persecutor of the Johnstones was Robert Clive, Governor of the East India Company who was himself depicted by Dirks as an example of the widespread corruption within the eighteenth-century British imperial system.8 The chapter dedicated to this aspect is to the subject is most eloquent in this regard.

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Although the term is not always used literally, the fight against “dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power” (as it is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English) is a long-standing one in Iberia.9 It dates back to medieval times and can be seen in a multitude of laws and practices that were to be transferred over to the American administration. Aside from the multitude of regulations contained in catalogues of the time, such as the Nueva Recopilación, some of which are of medieval origin, a masterpiece on governance—such as that of Castillo de Bovadilla—is nothing but a long list of types of behaviour to be considered in order not to fall into this type of practice.10 Moreover, referring specifically to the administration of the empire in the seventeenth century, the jurist Juan de Solórzano contemplated an infinite number of cases and precautions to be taken to avoid the corrupt acts of judges and delegates of the king.11 Of course, there is no doubt about the existence of the phenomenon. Moreover, while it must be seen as something very different from the patronage and cronyism common in the political culture and practices of the time, it is no less true that the boundaries between those practices and what we consider to be corruption were not always clear. Examples of conflicts between different factions and the resulting accusations—in specific cases such as that of the Viceroy of Peru, Count of Villar—provide clear evidence of how blurred this fine line was, as well as all too often subject to different interpretations by the various competing sides.12 As in all empires, these corrupt practices were facilitated by distance, the difficulties of knowing what was happening in the most far-flung regions and the asymmetry of information in general—all of which gave ample autonomy to officials and agents operating far from the metropolis.13 Moreover, the stigma of dishonest acts was a consequence of the very anatomy of the empire. The corruption of officials and local elites was part of the negotiation between the metropolis and the colonies, and the Spanish empire was a “negotiated empire” par excellence from its origins.14 Its structure also lent itself to such practices,15 based on dense urban administrative councils, which required a relatively large number of civil servants and officials responsible for their overall political management. Of equal importance was the strong involvement of the Creole and Spanish elites, in whose hands large amounts of wealth circulated. As Adam Smith himself said, the lower value of silver compared to other areas where it was less abundant, rendering illegal trade in this product especially interesting, attempts to maintain a trade monopoly

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system impossible to enforce, and the fact that smuggling is by nature more intense where high-value goods are being traded, made fraud in the exchange of goods inevitable leading to systematic prosecution by the Crown.16 Furthermore, it is interesting to bear in mind that this smuggling—and illegal trade in general, although many officials or members of the colonial elites were also involved—used to be an activity which was carried out with the participation of agents from other countries. This undoubtedly made it easier for the empire’s competitors to become aware of what was going on and, in turn, led to many critiques of the malfunctioning of the colonial system—from both inside and outside Spain. The strong family-based component—and indeed cronyism—that characterised society in that period, and the fact that this empire was created at a time when kinship relations prevailed over the power of formal institutions throughout Europe, reinforced this situation. In fact, the logic of these informal enforcement institutions often contradicted the political agenda of the central power. As I have tried to explain elsewhere, social networks based on kinship, friendship and other forms of solidarity created forms of reciprocity and confidence building which, while crucial for the expansion of Iberian empires, were also decisive in weakening state action and promoting practices that limited it.17 This also created a different idea of what dishonest behaviour was. We must additionally bear in mind that this type of behaviour was at that time—and continues to be present—the product of social networks that created their own logic and political ideology. Some legal historians have spoken of the family as the fundamental axis of political theory in that period.18 All this means that the force of such dishonesty acted in defiance of the authority and necessities of the king was much greater than in empires less based on kinship, as well as with more developed states and political systems when it came to monitoring the actions of public officials and political agents in general. It is also quite possible that, especially up until the seventeenth century, the visibility of dishonest acts increased in comparison with later empires. On the one hand, we are dealing with an empire within which the Crown had great needs to reinforce its control, and even its forms of colonial monopoly, just at a time when globalisation was leading to the constant opening of new trade routes, which encouraged smuggling in the aforementioned sense. Moreover, smuggling— often carried out with the connivance of the colonial authorities—along with excesses involving patronage and appointments, was one of the most obvious manifestations

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of corruption. On the other hand, the negotiated nature of the empire led to more than a few fractures in the pact between the metropolis and the colonial elites—and even within those elites. Essentially, it was what I term a conflictive pact. In other words, the Spanish empire, like the Portuguese empire—and to a great extent like all empires—relied on a pact between the Crown and the colonial elites. This asserted nothing more than the means of overcoming a situation of inherent conflict between them, and which derived from the constitution of the empire itself as a set of agents with not necessarily concordant, and sometimes opposing, agendas. It was therefore logical that accusations of dishonesty and bad government were very frequent, since the very terms of the negotiation and the colonial pact were very diverse and often not explicit, which created a very wide and delicate field of discussion, interpretation and confrontation.19 The crown control system itself was not only of a limited efficiency but made the phenomenon more visible. It should be said that there are effectively two ways of repressing corruption. On the one hand, there is that of modern bureaucracies where control systems are established on a day-to-day basis and where deviations are corrected in normal practice, often even before the official leaves his or her post. In that system, dishonest acts by the authorities are not only more difficult to commit but also more imperceptible and diffuse; less likely to give rise to scandal and exposure. Additionally, on the other hand, there is that of a posteriori controls, inspections and trials of residence—both common in the Spanish empire. In short: a system in which, in a posteriori investigation, a multitude of faults that have not been corrected over the years can come to light, and even be exaggerated, becoming a source of scandal. This is especially true if, as was customary, visitors’ enquiries were based on surveys with “victims” of the officials, whose simple accusations— sometimes anonymous and sometimes also of interest—could amplify behaviour that was dishonest or close to dishonesty or fraud. This could even lead to unfounded accusations that often increase the historian’s sense of systemic corruption. It is also worth considering the cross-border nature of the allegations of corruption, which—as is well-known—facilitated their disclosure, and has been highlighted in the current investigation. Thus, for countries such as Holland, England or France, promoting the image of a corrupt—and therefore decadent—Spanish empire was a political propaganda weapon of enormous power. Louis XIV himself had to refute this image of Spain that emerged in the French court, after decades of admiration mixed

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with rejection, which could harm his claims to the Crown of Madrid by virtue of the image of a decadent country unworthy of the effort of annexation.20 Furthermore, this weapon in the hands of anti-Spanish propaganda was all the more powerful because it was often based on a high degree of self-criticism that the fight against administrative dishonesty also provoked among civil servants and enlightened Spaniards. These self-critical parties proposed reforms that were undoubtedly necessary, but also anathematised the previous Habsburg dynasty that had been displaced after a fierce Europe-wide war with the ruling Bourbons.21 Moreover, it is interesting to remember—and this would merit specific research—that the image some learned foreigners had of the Spanish empire, as in the case of William Robertson to whom we referred earlier, came from enlightened Iberian elites themselves and the information they provided.22 The question we have to ask ourselves is: what does the study of the empires of the early modern era, and in particular of the Spanish empire, tell us in the context of recent debates on corruption? One of the most evident aspects when it comes to relating what we know about corruption in the empires of the early modern era—and in particular of the Spanish empire—with what we know today about nineteenth-century corruption, is the importance of what has been called “competing normative systems” or “clashing ideologies”.23 There are several reasons for this: on the one hand, the empires were based on normative codes that clashed with each other even in their own metropolises. This is the case of the conflict, frequent at the time, between family solidarity and the systems of patronage and cronyism that sometimes resembled—or gave rise to—corrupt practices, on the one hand, with the interests of the king or the kingdom. The cases of the Duke of Lerma and many other figures during the reign of Philip III, who ended up being accused of corrupt practices, are a good example of this.24 There are also many other countries, such as England, where corruption would lead to some of the accusations that would precipitate the revolution of 1640.25 Furthermore, contact with colonial societies involved the overlapping of often conflicting or ill-matched regulatory codes and customs, whereby corruption, bad governance, patronage, cronyism, nepotism and so on, gave rise to very different moral and political qualifications. This stems from the importance of what A. M. Hespanha has called the “unofficial law”— the rules of which were very different from those of the Crown.26 The

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gifts that the Johnstone family received from Hindu elites in the eighteenth century—giving rise to accusations of corruption by the East India Company—were, however, acceptable to Hindu standards of behaviour. Thus, this practice was not necessarily alien to what the family itself understood to be perfectly legitimate actions.27 This type of problem was very common in the Spanish empire. From the perspective of some jurists, the repartimientos de indios, where the Indians were forced to give part of their production to the authorities of the King of Spain, were also a dishonest form of abuse of power. However, the practice was not perceived in this way by many of those officials who understood that, once the offices acquired from the Crown were paid for, they had every right to compensate for that expense, and even to obtain the funds necessary to pay off the loans received from the merchants for the acquisition of those posts. Even many native Americans quite possibly saw in them only the continuation of pre-Colombian tributary practices, which were culturally and fiscally expressed in the form of gifts.28 In societies where the contexts were so diverse, the difference in normative codes became even more evident—even among the various confronting European countries. Thus, smuggling involving Spanish officials and elites, as well as English and Dutch merchants in the Caribbean was considered by many—and certainly by Madrid—to be an illicit and corrupt act. Nonetheless, the English settlers in New England were able to defend their trade with the Caribbean—and even with the Netherlands, which was the other end of the smuggling networks in the Caribbean— despite the fact that it violated the Navigation Acts. They argued that this trade, prior to the London prohibitions, was a derivative right of freedoms that England was trying to suppress through tyranny. What were considered to be corrupt practices in one empire would be, in the other, the basis of the political theory that would justify even the war of independence several decades later.29 The only difference was that in the English colonies a political theory was being developed on the basis of a practice that, from their perspective, was being threatened with tyranny from London. Empires can likewise illustrate—and even change—our image of the transition process towards the modern concept of corruption that was to be imposed in the nineteenth century. Such a transition often occurs as a result of changes in political theory, and there is even debate as to whether it is part of a modernisation process resulting from the separation of the public and private spheres.30 However, when viewed from the perspective

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of imperial control, this conclusion may be reinforced since it is obvious that the strategic struggle against “dishonest” practices is a reflection of the rise of the Leviathan, and its interest in repressing behaviour that— previously illegal or not—could interfere with the absolute power of the typical monarch of enlightened despotism. Thus, the eighteenth-century authorities’ struggle to curb dishonest activities among the bureaucracy had nothing to do with the separation between public and private, or with the modern character of the empire. It was simply part of the state’s attempt to take over colonial resources—economic and political— which had hitherto been in the hands of the elites. Moreover, this is parallel to the transition from a “composite empire”—or inserted in a composite monarchy—to a mercantilist empire, conceived as an appendix of a proto-national state in formation.31 This is important because it may contribute to a better understanding of the persistence, during the nineteenth century, of forms of corruption typical of the Ancien Régime. Additionally, we can further understand that which had more to do with power struggles and changing terms of negotiation between the colonial elites and the metropolis than with the supposed modernity of the empires. There is another aspect that is relevant when considering the corruption of the early modern empires in light of the current history of corruption. Today we try to approach corruption and its repression in order to better understand the political culture of the moment, the oftencontradictory principles that create the margins of political action. This brings us to contrasting discourses on the phenomenon, and helps us to understand and compare these behaviours and their contexts.32 However, dating corruption—like putting a date on all major issues—is important not only to better understand it in itself, but also to shed light on more general problems; for instance, the evolution of the economy, state-building, state capacity, modernisation processes, imperial dynamics and similar phenomena. Also, it is at that level that we must be very cautious for two reasons. On the one hand because, especially in the case of pre-modern empires, the way to understanding these issues is not only by studying the different models of corruption according to the ideas of the time but also by analysing many other behaviours. For example, those that—at the time—were not always clearly typified as dishonest and fraudulent, such as patronage and cronyism in general, and whose effects on the political system, political economy or institutional efficiency were identical. In other words, if we want to continue to take stock of the

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effects of corruption on economic, political and social development, it cannot be studied in isolation. Rather, it must be associated with practices whose classification as dishonest was not very clear at the time, but which had similar effects. It is from this perspective that I should like to return to the Spanish empire to make some further observations. In order to understand the effects of corruption in a broader context, it seems to me that it must be considered in the context of the tense relationship between formal and informal institutions—within which it is produced. Or, in other words, in the tension between what new institutional economics understands as formal and informal mechanisms of enforcement. This approach, which I have tried to apply in a recent study, allows us to see that empires are differentiated from one another precisely in this balance.33 In all cases, there has been a tension between personal rules and formal state institutions—sometimes called public institutions—that is often at the root of corruption, cronyism and so on. Nevertheless, some—the English for example—have perhaps been more effective in the way the state is able to limit such practices and capture resources according to established public norms. This has been shown in two books by P. Vries and Bin Wong and Rosenthal, respectively, written from different perspectives and taking the case of China as a reference.34 While we obviously need a comparison with other European cases, such an approach also puts empires into perspective. The Spanish, like many others that preceded it and even like some from the nineteenth century, was simply an empire in which “personal rules” based on family ties, cronyism, nepotism and reciprocity on identities often imposed their logic on that of formal institutions when there was a clash between the two. This factor—to a large extent because the latter did not respond to the criteria of Weberian bureaucracy whereby for a long time they were viewed from the present—is a clear exercise of anachronism. However, the Iberian empires were no exception; this has been a feature of all empires for thousands of years. The key fact—also for the understanding of the contexts of corruption—was that between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, at least “European” empires would develop so that formal institutions would become more efficient in imposing themselves onto the logic of that other type of solidarity, and of ways of creating trust and of implementing enforcement. Without eradicating it, this new logic created a different and less favourable context for corruption. Or, at least, a context in which corruption would become what we currently understand as such, a phenomenon with clearer contours. Moreover, this was at the same time that

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practices that had not previously been considered as corrupt fell within this concept. This brings me to a final point about the role of corruption in the Spanish empire. In my view, this was characterised until the eighteenth century as an empire where corruption—and many of the practices that made the administration more ineffective when we look at it from a present-day perspective—was a way of externalising the costs of administration and protecting the colonies.35 It was the way to compensate in practice, as long as it did not give rise to scandal, the low salaries of colonial and metropolitan officials and elites, when it was not a question of the purchasers of public offices illegally compensating for the high price paid by them with the silent connivance of the monarch. Thus, these colonial elites used the enormous social capital afforded by their position to convert it into economic capital, by means that were not always honest. Corruption was thus a kind of lubricant—not unlike less punishable practices—without which it was very difficult to operate the pacts upon which empires were based. It is not strange that in the Spanish empire of the eighteenth century, the process of transforming those pacts into greater control from public institutions was associated with increasing fiscal pressure in the colonies and greater expenditure on them.36 This was indeed an imperial model in which there was a tendency not to externalise the costs of the empire by turning a blind eye to practices that limited the power of the state, but to do so through salaries and economic compensations that were paid for by increasing taxes, although this was not an obstacle to the systematic sale of positions and titles.37 However, this is not to say that there is an ideal model of state and bureaucracy or elite structure where corruption, cronyism or nepotism are non-existent, since it is evident that there is no such ideal in the reality closest to us. ∗ ∗ ∗ In keeping with the core aims of this volume, I would like to conclude with some reflections on how to study imperial corruption in the transition from early modern to modern and contemporary times. My first observation, which is a starting point, is very simple. We should not establish a clear divide between what we usually call early modern and modern times, and whose division we usually establish at the beginning of the English industrial revolution or the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars. On the one hand, such a division is not

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operative in the Asian empires, where this transition either did not take place or did so in a different way. In this sense, a global history of the changes in the forms, concepts, mechanisms and contexts of corruption may lead us to the reconstruction of different models, rather than to the creation of a general theory. In other words, a global and uniform history of the changes in this practice in the transition from early modern to modern times is most probably impossible. Rather, it should be recognised that there is no process of change applicable to all different areas of the world, at least in the years 1750–1850, in which we tend to examine that process. On the other hand, if we recognise—as we have done—that the change in the concept of what in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is considered as corruption in Europe, or in the West in general, has its origins in mercantilist-inspired policies, it can be said that globalisation and the commercial tensions inherent in it were central to that process. Thus, even though this conclusion may seem paradoxical, I think what is stated here may be a good starting point for a study that tries to understand corruption as a global phenomenon which materialized in many different ways and chronologies. Globalisation was, to a large extent and from the seventeenth century onwards, an important factor that forced empires to make changes conducive to increasing their state capacity above individual interests, and to consider certain practices that had not been considered as such before as corrupt. However, at the same time, it is difficult to detect a global model of transition from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the nineteenth century, which serves to define a homogeneous and uniform process of change in the contexts, the concept or practices and consequences of corruption. Following on from what I have written above, it also seems to me that we must approach the problem from the perspective of changes in the institutions. Indeed, the shift to modern imperialism in the nineteenth century seems to have brought about a major change between the formal and the informal enforcement institutions. Or, in other words, the development of modern bureaucracy not only in the metropolis but also in the colonial spheres implied a growing weight of formal institutions and their capacity to act as a third party in the creation of impersonal decision mechanisms above the networks of cronyism and patronage or of personal relations that, in certain contexts, were the key to processes and dynamics that undermined the power at the centre of those states. The question to be asked when studying corruption is whether this process occurred and,

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if so, how it did and to what mechanisms it responded to in different areas of the planet. This phenomenon can be related, of course, to the degree of centralisation of the state administration. Further, it can even be assumed that corruption was more frequent in systems belonging to contractor states or where patronage and cronyism were more highly developed than in centralised states, such as those of the nineteenth century and with a modern and efficient Weberian-style bureaucracy (or, at least, that is part of Max Weber’s own assumption). Moreover, some recent studies have shown that even in the eighteenth century, some central state institutions were capable of making decisions not guided by corrupt interests or political cronyism, but by criteria of administrative rationality and economic efficiency.38 Nonetheless, even this is a field open to research. The fact that some forms of contractor state, such as those that existed in the Iberian empires in the early modern era, have been identified with high degrees of corruption and administrative inefficiency does not necessarily imply that the capacity of the central power to tackle corrupt practices was directly related to the administration or the development of a centralised bureaucracy.39 On the contrary, that capacity can also be very high if the control mechanisms of the contractor state over the private agents to whom management functions are assigned are highly developed and efficient. This is perhaps one of the great differences between contractor states of the modern and contemporary era, and even the present time and those of the modern era, although this is also a hypothesis for further consideration. In the same vein, there is an often completely forgotten issue that arises from what has been stated here. As we have seen, I have associated the family relations and solidarity of the European Ancien Régime, often linked to the action of informal enforcement institutions, with corruption practices or those that limited the central capacity of the state to mobilise resources—such as patronage, cronyism and its natural derivation, nepotism. Of course, this forces a clarification that derives from recent literature on the contractor state: such practices were not necessarily the worst of the possible options in the context in which they occurred. Such was the case in the imperial confines where states of the early modern era—and with a very limited bureaucracy—were unable to act with any efficiency, except through contracts that sometimes implied cessions of sovereignty and, therefore, of capacity to control corrupt practices.40 All the same, in any case, a new line of thought opens up here that

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I find interesting: to what extent have changes in family and kinship structures themselves, both among dominant and colonised societies, been behind the changes in the practice of corruption and even such practices as patronage, cronyism and nepotism? The question is all the more interesting because family historians have long warned that the eighteenth century was the scene, at least in the West, of the shift from societies based on the extended family to societies in which the nuclear family predominated. The question, then, is to what extent this may have meant a weakening of family ties beyond the nuclear family that contributed to weakening practices of solidarity and reciprocity among distant relatives, which had hitherto justified some forms of corruption. From a political perspective, moreover, the absolutism of the eighteenth century gave rise to forms of negotiation between the state and the elites in which the latter’s capacity for political patronage—or rather their capacity to use state resources to feed their own patron/client system—seems to have diminished. If this is so, and even acknowledging the existence of practices of cronyism among the social elites and rulers of the nineteenth century, to what extent and how did this affect corruption as this new form of state advanced? Additionally, how—if at all—did it affect empires and the forms of corruption within them? Finally, I believe that in order to address this issue we should consider the issue of continuity. It is assumed that modern empires developed much more effective systems of colonial control than those of the previous era and that, in doing so, they were more efficient in tackling corrupt practices, patronage or cronyism. However, a whole current of research, that of the Subaltern Studies, reminds us of the enormous importance of the agency of those dominated up to the present day. In doing so, they also reinforce the idea of the existence of “competing normative systems”, or “clashing ideologies” in the most recent empires and, therefore, of the possibility of different perceptions of what corruption is or is not. If this is so, and we want to be rid of an overly teleological vision of the phenomenon, the question to be asked is: to what extent were the changes in this sense profound in the transition to the empires of the nineteenth century? Also, to what extent were there no mechanisms of resilience and adaptation in the behaviours that continued to limit the capacity of state control over this type of practice? In short, a view from the perspective of the early modern historian to modern imperial formations may throw up more questions than solutions, but that—most likely—is the advantage of the approach we have adopted here.

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Notes 1. In spite of the fact that it was heavily criticised at the time by Ramon Carande, a large portion of subsequent studies have been influenced, directly or indirectly, and therefore consciously or unconsciously, by Von Jacob Van Klaveren, “Die Historische Erscheinung der Korruption,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial und Wirtschaftgeschichte 44, no. 4 (1957): 289–324. Likewise, classical works such as Haring’s give considerable importance to this type of practice. See Clarence Haring, Comercio y Navegación entre España y las Indias (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1979). Regarding Pietschmann, one can find works like Horst Pietschmann, El estado y su evolución al principio de la colonización española de América (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989). More recent and of particular interest in terms of promoting a new approach to the subject is Christoph Rosenmüller and Stephan Ruderer, eds., Dádivas, dones y dineros. Aportes a una nueva historia de la corrupción en América Latina desde el imperio español a la modernidad (Madrid: IberoamericanaVervuert, 2016). The number of works dedicated to the subject has increased significantly in recent years. Some time ago, to give just a few examples, both José Manuel de Bernardo (José Manuel de Bernardo Ares, Corrupción política y centralización administrativa. La hacienda de Propios en la Córdoba de Carlos II (Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba, 1993), and I (Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, “Corrupción, fraude, eficacia hacendística y economía en la España del siglo XVII,” Hacienda Pública Española 1 (1994) endeavoured to situate this type of practice in the context of state architecture in the early modern era, using a local approach based on a case studies. For example, Cordoba, in which the first of these authors reflects on the relations between them and the political and institutional organisation in the Ancien Régime. Such studies, which in part followed in the wake of Waquet (Jean Claude Waquet, La corruzione. Morale e potere a Firenze nel XVII e XVIII secolo [Milán: Mondadori, 1986]) were regarded as a “constitutionalist” approach and nuanced—and criticised to some extent—by Santos Madrazo (Santos Madrazo, Estado débil y ladrones poderosos en la España del siglo XVIII [Madrid: Catarata, 2000]), who, in addition to studying a particular case, makes a comprehensive critical examination of the issue. Around the same time, we also had studies that addressed the issue in a broader context, but with reference to the Iberian Peninsula, such as Antonio Feros, Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of Philip III, 1598–1621 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). In recent years—and in light of a revival of the subject, perhaps due to its unfortunate relevance in the present day—there have been very interesting and important contributions: Francisco Andújar and Pilar Ponce Leiva, eds., Mérito, venalidad y corrupción en España y América. Siglos

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2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

XVII y XVIII (Valencia: Albatros, 2016) provides a good approximation and update of the state of research in Spain, based on case studies that have been carried out both in the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas. William Robertson, The History of America (Dublin: Tourneisen and Legrand, 1777), 3: 334. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics Edition, 1981; edition R. H. Cambell, A. S. Skinner and W. B. Todd, a reproduction of the Oxford publication, Oxford University Press, 1979), 511 and ff. It was also based on Raynal’s previous analysis. Of particular interest are his reflections on the venality of justice, a subject which had interested Adam Smith and which takes on, for him, an even more moral dimension than for the Scottish intellectual. See John Bowring, “The Works of Jeremy Bentham,” Online Library of Liberty, accessed October 20, 2019, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/benthamthe-works-of-jeremy-bentham-vol-4. Not a bad observation, coming not only from the most lucid mind among eighteenth-century political economists, but from one who had first-hand knowledge from serving as Customs Commissioner in 1778. See “General Introduction,” in Smith, Nature and Causes, 53. Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cornell University Press, 2005). An interesting discussion on the meaning of corruption in the Netherlands during this epoch, in Mary Lindeman, “Dirty Politics or “Harmonie”? Defining Corruption in Early Modern Amsterdam and Hamburg,” Journal of Social History 45, no. 3 (2012): 582–604. On smuggling as a sort of corruption which is in part a way of “vital” negotiation for the “survival” of the colonies can be found in Bram Hoonhout, “Smuggling for Survival: Self-Organized, Cross-Imperial Colony Building in Essequibo and Demerara, 1746–1796,” in Beyond Empires. Global, Self Organizing, Cross-Imperial Networks, 1500–1800, eds. Cátia Antunes and Amélia Pólonia (Brill: Leiden and Boston, 2016), 212–235. Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire. India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008). For a study on the appearance of the term in Spanish during the modern era, see Francisco Andújar Castillo, Pilar Ponce Leiva and Antonio Feros, “A Sick Body. Corruption and Anticorruption in Early Modern Spain,” in Anti-corruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era, eds. Ronald Kroeze, André Vitória and Guy Geltner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). For a discussion of the current definition of the term,

2

10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

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see Wayne Sandholtz and William Koetzle, “Accounting for Corruption: Economic Structure, Democratic Norms, and Trade,” Center for the Study of Democracy, accessed January 2019, https://escholarship.org/ uc/item/42w2c8b2. See Juan Castillo de Bovadilla, Política para corregidores y señores de vassallos (Madrid: Luis Suárez publishers, 1597). Juan de Solórzano Pereira, Política Indiana (Amberes: Henrico y Cornelio Verdusesn, 1703). Also, Enrique García Hernán, Consejero de ambos mundos: vida y obra de Juan de Solórzano Pereira (1575–1655) (Madrid: Fundación Mapfre, 2007). Luis M. Costa Vigo, “Por no ir tan solo. Redes clientelares y dinámicas de poder en el virreinato del Perú: el caso del gobierno del virrey conde de Villar, 1585–1590,” in Parientes, criados y allegados: los vínculos personales en el mundo virreinal peruano, ed. Margarita Suárez (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2015), 63–66. Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe, c. 1425–1668 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), chapters 3 and 7. Ibid. The subject has been discussed in relation to the Iberian Peninsula, but there are no major differences in this regard between the two sides of the Atlantic. Yun-Casalilla, “Corrupción.” Smith, Nature and Causes, 53. It is also interesting to note that in this case, apart from being based on the Abbot Raynal, as I said, it was also based on Jerónimo Uztáriz, Theorica y practica de comercio y de marina (Madrid: Antonio Sanz, 1757). Yun-Casalilla, Iberian World Empires, Chapter 7. Bartolomé Clavero, “Del estado presente a la familia pasada (a propósito de estudios sobre la Famiglia Aristocratica así como también de la Familia Mediterránea),” Quaderni fiorentini per la storia del pensiero giuridico moderno 18, no. 1 (1989). For one case, among many others, see Luis M. Costa Vigo, “Por no ir tan solo.” For a study of the French case, focusing mainly on the action of the French ambassadors in Madrid, see Ana Álvarez, La fabricación de un imaginario. Los embajadores de Luis XIV y España (Madrid: Cátedra, 2008). The problem of corruption and its perception in Spain and the Spanish empire should be considered as part of the general confrontation of apologies and critiques of the country, which started with the novatores at the end of the seventeenth century. See Antonio Mestre Sanchis, Apología y crítica de España en el siglo XVIII (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2003).

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22. Ida Pugliese, “Le Métier d’Historien during the Enlightenment: William Robertson and the writing of the History of America” (PhD diss., Florence, European University Institute, 2010). 23. Toon Kerkhoff, Ronald Kroeze and Pieter Wagenaar, “Corruption and the Rise of Modern Politics in Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Comparison Between France, the Netherlands, Germany and England. Introduction,” Journal of Modern European History 11, no. 1 (February 2013). 24. Feros, Kingship and Favoritism. 25. This idea is already very old. See for example Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961); Conrad Russel, The Crisis of Parliaments. English History 1509– 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 26. Antonio M. Hespanha, Vísperas del Leviatán. Instituciones y poder político (Portugal siglo XVII) (Madrid: Taurus, 1989); “A constituçao do Império português de alguns enviesamentos correntes,” in O antigo regime nos trópicos. A dinâmica imperial portuguesa (séculos XVI –XVIII), eds. Joao Fragoso, Maria F. Bicalho and Maria F. Gouvêa (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2001). Also by Lauren Benton, see among other works Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002). 27. Rothschild, Inner Life. 28. Robert W. Patch, “Imperial Politics and Local Economy in Colonial Central America, 1670–1770,” Past and Present 143 (May 1994). 29. David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1987); Mark Peterson, “Boston Pays Tribute: Autonomy and Empire in the Atlantic World, 1630–1714,” in Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714. The Atlantic Connection, eds. Allan Macinnes and Arthur H. Williamson (Leiden, Brill, 2006). 30. For an overview of all these problems, see the collective volume edited by Pieter Wagenaar, James Kennedy, Mark Rutgers and Joris van Eijnatten, eds., “The Genesis of Public Value Systems,” Public Voices (special issue) 10, no. 2 (2008). 31. Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, “El imperio español entre la monarquía compuesta y el colonialismo mercantil. Metodologías, contextos institucionales y perspectivas para el estudio de la fiscalidad y la movilización de recursos,” in La fiscalidad novohispana en el imperio español. Conceptualizaciones, proyectos y contradicciones, eds. María del P. Martínez, Ernest Sánchez and Matilde Souto (Mexico: UNAM, 2015). 32. Kerkhoff, Kroeze, and Wagenaar, “Rise of Modern Politics.” 33. Yun-Casalilla, Iberian World Empires. 34. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and Roy Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge,

2

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

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MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Peer Vries, State, Economy and the Great Divergence: Great Britain and China, 1680s –1850s (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). I developed this idea in Iberian World Empires, chapters 7 and 8. Ibid., 369–371. Francisco Andújar, El sonido del dinero. Monarquía, ejército y venalidad en la España del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2004). In this regard, although deserving of a more detailed comment, I find most interesting the work of the Jean Beuve, Eric Brousseau and Jérôme Sgard, “Why Are Early Modern Bureaucracies Special? State Support to Private Firms in Early Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of Economic History 77, no. 4 (December 2017): 1144–1176. See Ian A. A. Thompson, War and Government in Habsburg Spain (London: Athlone Press, 1976). Yun-Casalilla, Iberian World Empires.

References Adams, Julia. The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe. Nueva York: Cornell University Press, 2005. Álvarez, Ana. La fabricación de un imaginario. Los embajadores de Luis XIV y España. Madrid: Cátedra, 2008. Andújar, Francisco. El sonido del dinero. Monarquía, ejército y venalidad en la España del siglo XVIII . Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2004. Andújar, Francisco, and Pilar Ponce Leiva, eds. Mérito, venalidad y corrupción en España y América. Siglos XVII y XVIII . Valencia: Albatros, 2016. Andújar Castillo, Francisco, Pilar Ponce Leiva, and Antonio Feros. “A Sick Body. Corruption and Anticorruption in Early Modern Spain.” In Anti-corruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era, eds. Ronald Kroeze, André Vitória and Guy Geltner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 139–152. Benton, Lauren. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002. Bernardo Ares, José. Corrupción política y centralización administrativa. La hacienda de Propios en la Córdoba de Carlos II . Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba, 1993. Beuve, Jean Eric Brousseau, and Jérôme Sgard. “Why Are Early Modern Bureaucracies Special? State Support to Private Firms in Early EighteenthCentury France.” Journal of Economic History 77, no. 4 (December 2017): 1144–1176.

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Clavero, Bartolomé. “Del estado presente a la familia pasada (a propósito de estudios sobre la Famiglia Aristocratica así como también de la Familia Mediterránea).” Quaderni fiorentini per la storia del pensiero giuridico moderno 18, no. 1 (1989): 583–605. Costa Vigo, Luis M. “Por no ir tan solo. Redes clientelares y dinámicas de poder en el virreinato del Perú: el caso del gobierno del virrey conde de Villar, 1585–1590.” Parientes, criados y allegados: los vínculos personales en el mundo virreinal peruano, edited by Margarita Suárez, 37–68. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2015. Dirks, Nicholas B. The Scandal of Empire. India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008. Feros, Antonio. Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of Philip III, 1598–1621. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. García Hernán, Enrique. Consejero de ambos mundos: vida y obra de Juan de Solórzano Pereira (1575–1655). Madrid: Fundación Mapfre, 2007. Haring, Clarence. Comercio y Navegación entre España y las Indias. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1979. First edition in English 1918. Hespanha, Antonio M. Vísperas del Leviatán. Instituciones y poder político. (Portugal siglo XVII). Madrid: Taurus, 1989. Hespanha, Antonio M. “A constituçao do Império português de alguns enviesamentos correntes.” In O antigo regime nos trópicos. A dinâmica imperial portuguesa (séculos XVI–XVIII), edited by J. Fragoso, M. F. Bicalho and M. F. Gouvêa, 163–188. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2001. Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961. Kerkhoff, Toon, Ronald Kroeze, and Pieter Wagenaar. Corruption and the Rise of Modern Politics in Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Comparison Between France, the Netherlands, Germany and England. Introduction.” Journal of Modern European History 11, no. 1 (February 2013): 19–30. Klaveren, Von Jacob Van. “Die Historische Erscheinung der Korruption.” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial und Wirtschaftgeschichte 44, no. 4 (1957): 289– 324. Lovejoy, David S. The Glorious Revolution in America. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1987. Madrazo, Santos. Estado débil y ladrones poderosos en la España del siglo XVIII . Madrid: Catarata, 2000. Mestre Sanchis, Antonio. Apología y crítica de España en el siglo XVIII . Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2003. Patch, R. W. “Imperial Politics and Local Economy in Colonial Central America, 1670–1770.” Past and Present 143 (May 1994): 77–107.

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Peterson, Mark. “Boston Pays Tribute: Autonomy and Empire in the Atlantic World, 1630–1714.” In Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714. The Atlantic Connection, edited by Allan Macinnes and Arthur H. Williamson, 311–335. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Pietschmann, Horst. El estado y su evolución al principio de la colonización española de América. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989. Pugliese, Ida. “Le Métier d’Historien during the Enlightenment: William Robertson and the writing of the History of America.” PhD diss., Florence, European University Institute, 2010. Rosenmüller, Christoph, and Stephan Ruderer, eds. Dádivas, dones y dineros. Aportes a una nueva historia de la corrupción en América Latina desde el imperio español a la modernidad. Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2016. Rosenthal, J., and Roy Bin Wong. Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Rothschild, Emma. The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Russel, Conrad. The Crisis of Parliaments. English History 1509–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Sandholtz, Wayne, and William Koetzle. “Accounting for Corruption: Economic Structure, Democratic Norms, and Trade.” Center for the Study of Democracy, UC Irvine: Center for the Study of Democracy. Retrieved from https:// escholarship.org/uc/item/42w2c8b2. Thompson, Ian A. A. War and Government in Habsburg Spain. London: Athlone Press, 1976. Vries, Peer. State. Economy and the Great Divergence: Great Britain and China, 1680s–1850s. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Wagenaar, Pieter James Kennedy, Mark Rutgers, and Joris van Eijnatten, eds. “The Genesis of Public Value Systems.” Public Voices (special issue) 10, no. 2 (2008). Waquet, Jean Claude. La corruzione. Morale e potere a Firenze nel XVII e XVIII secolo. Milán: Mondadori, 1986. Yun-Casalilla, Bartolomé. “Corrupción, fraude, eficacia hacendística y economía en la España del siglo XVII.” Hacienda Pública Española 1 (1994): 47–60. Yun-Casalilla, Bartolomé. “El imperio español entre la monarquía compuesta y el colonialismo mercantil. Metodologías, contextos institucionales y perspectivas para el estudio de la fiscalidad y la movilización de recursos.” In La fiscalidad novohispana en el imperio español. Conceptualizaciones, proyectos y contradicciones, eds. María del P. Martínez, Ernest Sánchez and Matilde Souto, 29–68. Mexico: UNAM, 2015. Yun-Casalilla, Bartolomé. Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe, c. 1425–1668. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

CHAPTER 3

Corruption, Empire and State-Building: An Entangled History of the British and French “Imperial Nation States” and Hyderabad, c.1760–1800 Tanja Bührer

Introduction In the 1770s, servants of the British East India Company (BEIC) who returned from South Asia with spectacular fortunes became subjects of popular hostility. They were broadly caricatured in graphic satires and plays and represented as suspiciously rich by abuse of office for emolument.1 In February 1788, the stage was set for the impeachment of the presumably corrupt governance of the first Governor General of the BEIC, Warren Hastings. Considering that thousands of Britons made their livings in the shadow of the company, it is somewhat surprising that a broader public cared about the fortunes of about 30 wealthy socalled nabobs at the time.2 Also, there was a long-standing argumentation

T. Bührer (B) University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Kroeze et al. (eds.), Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era, Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9_3

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against “old corruption”, meaning domestic corruption of an élite circle within home government, who sold their political support in return for profitable offices and contracts resulting in an immense tax burden at the expense of the public.3 So why then did a case of colonial corruption cause the first impeachment in Britain for 40 years, becoming by far the most spectacular public scandal of corruption?4 Also, how were issues of corruption in the process of national state-building interconnected with anticorruption reforms in South Asian empire-building? For a true understanding, this scandalised case of imperial corruption must be analysed in a multi-perspective approach by connecting the traditionally separated fields of national history, the history of empirebuilding and area studies. Imperial history always thought about the national context, but in a one-sided Eurocentric focus on metropolitan primary movers of expansion, and implementation of imperial projects of modernisation on the “peripheries”. Historians of European states assumed that national history was untroubled by its imperial projects and could be comprehended without reference to their empires.5 Both fields, however, entrench the dominant narrative of state-building processes, modernisation and concepts of good governance as endogamous European processes that presumably provided the model for the rest of the world. This notion has been strongly criticised, since the 1990s, by scholars of postcolonial thought from global regions outside of Europe.6 Area studies, by contrast, were focusing on local initiatives, forces and actors. Yet by the 1980s, they became so empirically specialised and detached both from European imperial centres and each other that they could no longer be incorporated into a broader context.7 The turn towards global history provided national, imperial and regional histories outside the West with new perspectives via the study of transregional and worldwide connections.8 Therefore, European domestic and imperial histories, in what follows, are understood as combined complexes of emerging “imperial nation-states” shaped by national statebuilding processes, cross-cultural encounters in empires grounded in local circumstances and inter-imperial interactions. My argument is that colonial corruption was not scandalised because company servants were more corrupt than their metropolitan counterparts, nor was the implementation of anticorruption reforms on the margins of empire caused by presumable deficiencies compared to national standards of good governance and state service. The specific anxieties regarding colonial and nabobish corruption were intimately related to

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its emergence from intercultural encounters with alien societies, as well as from inter-imperial interactions with other expanding European powers. Therefore, it is necessary to consider historically documented crosscultural interactions on the ground through a micro-political approach, which will be pursued by focusing on the relations between the BEIC and the South Indian “Princely State” Hyderabad. Likewise, the South Asian dynamics of the global Anglo-French rivalries will be examined through the local lens of events in Hyderabad. Firstly, however, the larger context of national discourses about “colonial” corruption and calls for the reform of company governance need to be outlined.

National Debates About “Colonial” Corruption and the Reform of Company Governance The national governments, both in Britain and France, suffered from a load of debt and credit crises caused by a series of global wars, such as the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). The rivalry with the French in India, combined with the increasing involvements of the British and French companies in alliance with regional Indian rulers, led equally to extensive wars on the South Indian scene and near bankruptcy of the BEIC. Since the BEIC was a crucial component of the fiscal nation-state, its affairs became an issue of national political debate, which was additionally fuelled by the circumstance that some of the returning company servants had made a private fortune from warfare and diplomatic exchanges in South Asia.9 Parliamentary inquiries began to question the constitutional relationship between the BEIC and the national government, as well as the public comportment of company servants. Already the former Commander-in-Chief and founding figure of Britain’s emerging Indian empire, Robert Clive, had to answer to charges of corruption before the bar of the House of Commons between 1772 and 1773. Clive had set the pattern for a nabob’s imperial career, returning with a tremendous fortune gained by cross-cultural transactions, such as accepting lucrative gifts, moneylending, use of contracts, trading rights, bribery and confiscation. Many of the estates Clive purchased back in Britain controlled Parliamentary seats, and he could marry his daughter to noble blood with imperial money.10 Clive escaped Parliamentary reprimand, but the political debates surrounding his fortune led to the passing of the Regulating Act of 1773, which was

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a major step on the road to harness imperial wealth and Parliamentary control.11 At the beginning of the 1780s, however, allegations of corruption and excessive expansion began to circulate again. Governor General Warren Hastings was re-called in 1785, and soon afterwards impeached by the Whig politician Edmund Burke.12 William Pitt’s India Act of 1784, which was strongly influenced by Burke’s investigations, already continued the path of national intervention. Pitt’s act instituted a Parliamentary appointed Board of Control for Indian Affairs to supervise the company’s India policy and its dispatches with Indian rulers. Yet, the governmental check by the board made correspondence even slower and, apart from the general policy, decision-making was always left to the discretion of the local government. Therefore, the office of the governor general was no longer appointed by the company’s Court of Directors, but tied directly to the Crown and the prime minister.13 Additionally, the acts of 1773 and 1784 aimed at a stronger executive in India by investing the governor general and Supreme Council of Bengal with superior and supervisory powers over the Governors of Bombay and Madras.14 On top of that, basic norms of public service were introduced: company officials were banned from engaging in private trade as well as from accepting private gifts, and they were no longer allowed to privately appropriate the revenues of territorial acquisitions that henceforth all belonged to the Crown.15 According to James Epstein, the empire’s return home in the guise of a scandal signalled a sense of dislocation of metropolitan political culture with its empire.16 However, recent studies on eighteenth-century Britain have shown that the long held perception of British society as uniquely liberal was largely a myth.17 Domestic service likewise was shaped by patronage-client relations among a narrow clique, and the notion that civil office was a form of private property and opportunity for emolument at the expense of the public was a key characteristic of “old corruption” as well. Political power of the day must not be understood as a direct organ of class or interest politics, but as a secondary political formation from which other kinds of economic and social power were gained. Places and rotten boroughs enabled the landed gentry to fill the House of Commons with Members of Parliament responsive to their own will, and ministers bequeathed profitable offices, pensions and governmental contracts to their clients as rewards for their political support.18

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The nabobs and colonial corruption, therefore, must have set off deeper concerns about social and political transformations of the time. We must consider a specific elitist and conservative understanding of corruption that identified corruption with monied interests, which threatened to upset the social order of the Ancien Régime and the (corrupt) privileged position of the landed gentry.19 BEIC servants included a high proportion of genteel poor, or even middle-class men, and of candidates from the margins of the British Isles such as Scots and Irish, who did not yet have access to the mainland service.20 London, in a double strategy, sought to secure their collaboration in empire-building in order to generate the imperial servants necessary to provide the large-scale global enterprises and to integrate them into the project of the emerging British imperial nation-state.21 The beginning territorial expansion of the BEIC, however, opened new routes to advancement for upstarts who took the way of discomfort and dangers of imperial service to climb the ladder into the domestic high society.22 Also, while colonial scandals fostered awareness of “national” norms of good governance and the necessity for reform of imperial governance, they simultaneously had the potential to make a suitable scapegoat and to divert public attention from systemic domestic corrupt ruling practices and abuse of office.23 The specific anxieties nabobish corruption raised in British society must be additionally understood against the backdrop of major changes and crises of the British imperial nation-state within the global context. The extensive territorial gains after the Seven Years’ War combined with the loss of the predominantly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant North American colonies in 1783, which resulted in an increasing religiously and ethnically polyglot empire (e.g. French Catholics in Canada, Hindus and Muslims in India), threatened the collective British identification referring to liberty and Protestantism.24 It is no coincidence that Edward Gibbon, an English historian and Member of Parliament, published between 1766 and 1789 a six-volume work discussing the decline of the Roman empire due to barbaric invasion and the loss of civic virtues. Returning Nabobs thus not only were perceived as upstarts who threatened the traditional social order but also as carriers of Asiatic principles of government that would “corrupt” the British constitution and political, as well as public virtues. Burke’s speeches during Hastings’ impeachment strongly suggest the xenophobic fear that the nabobs, through their mobile lives, would circulate “Oriental” and hybrid practices of governance back home.25 Satirical cartoons represent them dressed in an “Oriental” style, suggesting they

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have been “going native”. This perspective is supported by the coinage of nabob, which is the transliteration of the Persian nawab—a Mughal title given to regional Muslim rulers. In describing the “tyranny” and abuse of Hastings’ arbitrary government, Burke claimed that the behaviour of company servants in India “resembled the service of the Marathas” with its “unbound license to plunder”.26 He categorically rejected Hastings’ argument of the need to adapt to a different cultural context, which he coined “geographical morality”, to legitimise deviance from national normative orders.27 Therefore, it was not only corruption in its standard meaning of private gain at public expense and clientelism that worried Burke and his contemporaries, but what they perceived as an inappropriate foreign influence on the national government and values. However, were South Asian understandings of public service and good governance so different from British standards? The next sections take a closer look at Indian notions of good governance, as well as cross-cultural exchanges and entanglements on the ground.

Mughal and Post-Mughal Norms of Governance The history of eighteenth-century South Asia was not only shaped by the declining Mughal empire but also by the dynamics of regional Indian state-building processes. Governors of Mughal provinces created, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, what can be described as “classic successor states” by carving out the districts they had been entrusted to ars administer.28 The most prominent “dynasties” founded by such subad¯ were the Nawabs of Bengal, the Nawab-Wazirs of Awadh and the Nizams of Hyderabad. Disregarding these secessionist actions, regional rulers did not take the final steps of emancipation, but continued to display symbolic loyalty to the Mughal emperor and to acquire juristic rights, grants and titles from the Delhi court.29 The emerging regional states maintained much of Mughal governance and administration as well as the diplomatic and courtly culture, which were largely modelled on Central Asian and Ottoman, although foremost Persian patterns.30 Persian was the key language of administration, diplomacy, scholarship and belles-lettres, as well as that of polite social interaction in Mughal and post-Mughal South Asia.31 Ambitious regional rulers were competing with one another for resources and legitimacy that led to complex networks of layered and competing suzerain-vassal relationships.32 Regional Indian states were

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characterised by a Mughal style central administration.33 Yet, their “central” policy was still strongly shaped by loosely structured patron-client relationships, an interwoven pattern of temporary alliances, factions and conflicts between local zamind¯ ars (local-level revenue collectors), in addition to Nawabs and inter-regional as well as foreign players. The Nawabs and the mighty zamind¯ ars of Hyderabad’s countryside, for instance, were not mere appointed administrative functionaries, but tributary local political authorities with considerable bargaining power. They occasionally stationed vakils (envoy, intermediary agent) at the Court of Hyderabad who were negotiating their interests and were maintaining communication.34 In the second half of the eighteenth century, the territorially expanding French and British merchant companies became additional participants in this ongoing struggle for sovereignty, and built their governments on the emergence of a new order stemming from these inner Indian transformaani (right to collect revenues) by the Mughal tions.35 The grant of the div¯ Emperor over the provinces Bengal, Bihar and Orissa after the battle of Buxar in 1764, is widely considered as a marker of the transition of the BEIC from trade to dominion. The establishment of the company state— both towards Indian rulers and the British national government and Crown—thus stemmed from the double legal sources of royal charters from the British king and the Mughal emperor.36 The Bengal presidency initially envisaged only a limited diplomatic and military role within Mughal structures of administration and law, but it increasingly was controlling offices and becoming sovereign of administrative and juridical authority over great populations of peasants and landholders.37 Buxar also marked British diplomatic expansion and inter-state relations all over the subcontinent that produced a legal pluralism by combining Mughal farm¯ ans (royal orders) and regional Indian rulers’ sanads (order of a minor Indian sovereign), privileges conferred by unilateral transactions and based on the principle of revocability, with European-style treaties.38 The BEIC dispatched diplomatic agents, in the local function of a vakil, to Indian courts and regional power centres. However, the compatibility of such rules of engagement between these different political cultures was ultimately created through face-to-face interactions of specific intermediaries.39 The years between the 1760s and 1800 can be considered as a formative period during which small and highly specialised Asian and European communities of intercultural diplomacy in South Asia emerged.40 Therefore, an agent-centred focus on

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key Asian and European diplomatic agents, and the norms of comportment they followed helps to comprehend contemporary understandings of good governance and corruption across political cultures. South Asian service people can roughly be divided into two groups. One group came from Muslim families belonging to the aristocracy or middle-income class with origins in West and Central Asia.41 Of these Muslim imperial scribes “Iranians” or “Persians” formed a significant group, which was partly sustained by immigration that continued unabated during the eighteenth century.42 The other groups dedicating themselves to imperial service came from Hindu scribal communities. Mughal empire-building across almost the whole subcontinent drew, through Indo-Mughal statecraft, disparate social and ethnic communities into partnership.43 The general account of an Indo-Persian secretary’s world, by the Brahman monshi 44 Chandar Bhan, sheds light on the professional selfunderstanding and norms of good governance prevalent in Mughal service. The era of Chander Bhan’s professional service under three Mughal emperors during the seventeenth century45 was characterised by an unprecedented streamlining and rationalisation of administration. Chander Bhan’s encompassing chronology Cahar Chaman contains a didactic ministerial guide and was also a kind of memoir. He described the reasons for his successful career in Mughal state service partly by his good sociability, favouritism from patrons and some luck. However, talent, ambition and achievements were likewise indispensable qualities in order to reach key positions of a powerful household, not only requiring a standard of professional training and administrative abilities, but also managerial competence, a refined etiquette, diplomatic as well as mystical sensibilities and a literary flair.46 This representation of an upward social mobility, based on principles of qualification and meritocracy, is corroborated by Gholam Hoseyn Kh¯an for the post-Mughal service of the eighteenth century. Coming from a family with a history of continuous employment with the Mughal Government of Delhi, he suffered from unsteady service with northern regional states and company patrons.47 In his History of the Modern Times (1781/1782) he critisized company governance in Bengal such that advancements of Indian scribes in company service were largely based on favouritism, because most company servants were ignorant of the individual monshi’s specific qualifications.48

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The ministerial guide of Chander Bhan also extends on norms of ethical guidance for professional conduct such as integrity, political discretion, trustworthiness, selflessness and humility. In addition, Chander Bhan mapped concepts of public welfare by drawing the difference between the public and the private, where “private” was understood as interest for material gain and emotional desires at the expense of the people. It was the “mystical civility” exemplified by great Sufis, Fakirs and Yogis that cultivated an attitude of disinterestedness in worldly activities and the lure of corruption among Mughal scribes and political agents.49 This basic understanding of corruption as abuse of office for personal gain is likewise supported by Gholam Hoseyn Kh¯an, who criticised company servants as greedy. It is striking to what extent Kh¯an’s critique of company men’s comportment—a published translation was only available in 1789—corresponds with Edmund Burke’s attacks in the opening speech of the impeachment in February 1788.50 It remains unclear to what extent Kh¯an’s account stemmed from his own reflections or from representations of British officials who were opposing Hasting’s governance. However, while national British interest groups aimed to harness nabobish wealth for national public welfare, Kh¯an complained that company officials transferred their fortune to Britain51 and thus were reducing the regional patronage of scholars, artists and the imperial service elite at Indian courts.52 53 ¯ The professional life of Hyderabad diplomatic agent Mir Alam provides further information about post-Mughal norms of state service ¯ acted during the formative and understandings of corruption. Mir Alam period of British-Hyderabad relations, from the mid-1780s to the beginning of the nineteenth century, as darb¯ ar vakil for British affairs. His role can be described as that of an intermediary who conducted the diplomatic transactions with the British resident stationed in the Hyderabad court.54 ¯ father had Due to his extraordinary talents and zeal, Mir Alam—whose migrated from Persia to Hyderabad—was noticed by the Hyderabad div¯ an (chief minister) Azim ol-Omar¯a.55 Both European and Indian ¯ skills diplomats stationed at the Hyderabad court recognised Mir Alam’s 56 and merits. The position of a darb¯ ar vakil for British affairs required ¯ ties to the Asaf J¯ahi dynasty, the favour of the chief minister, but also an awareness of company interests and a good relationship to the resident.57 He had to “be in the middle”58 and to be “acquainted with the business of both parties”.59 When Abdollatif identified the diplomatic mission ¯ was climbing up the to Calcutta in 1789 as the “reason that Mir Alam

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¯ had succeeded in becoming career ladder”,60 he implied that Mir Alam a protégé of the most important company patron, the Governor General ¯ ability to win mighty British patronage and Cornwallis.61 Mir Alam’s negotiate cross-cultural treaties was rewarded by Nizam Ali Kh¯an with honours, titles and gifts—such as j¯ agirs (land grants).62 Yet when the volatile regional system of alliances ruptured British¯ came into a very Hyderabad relations in the mid-1790s, Mir Alam difficult position and anti-British factions at the Hyderabad court openly ¯ of being “swayed by interested motives”63 and began to accuse Mir Alam of “siding with the English”,64 implying that he did not act in Hyderabad’s public interest. A British-Hyderabad alliance against Mysore and their final victory over their common arch-rival Tipu Sultan, in 1799, meant another upturn in his career. However, soon afterwards rumours ¯ had embezzled much of the state treabegan to circulate that Mir Alam sure that was carried to the war.65 The British resident James Kirkpatrick thought such a comportment “to be so inconsistent with the customary 66 Issues of corruption are notoriously difficult ¯ prudence” of Mir Alam. to prove, but much indicates that Azim ol-Omar¯a was distrustful of his former protégé, whom he suspected of aiming to remove him from ¯ long-standing and close ties the position of chief minister. Mir Alam’s with the increasingly superior British company highly alarmed his former patron, who succeeded to banish the darb¯ ar vakil for British affairs by spreading rumours of corruption—in the standard sense of the meaning abuse of office for personal gain. ¯ Abdollatif strongly emphasised Mir Alam’s spiritual virtues and his modest lifestyle before he embarked on an imperial service career, to which he allegedly had been seduced in his youth by political ¯ spiritual disposition as leaders.67 His representation of Mir Alam’s indifferent towards the lure of worldly interests—corresponding with Chander Bhan’s ethical norms of public office—certainly must be read as an attempt to fend off allegations of bribery against his cherished patron, which were circulating at the time when he was writing his work. Abdollatif instead generally accused the Hyderabad civil officials, courtiers and military commanders, all over the dominion, of being excessive and motivated solely by selfish interests. Following the saying that the “fish always stinks from the head downwards”, he observed that their attitude had a devastating influence on the entire governance and the population of the Nizam’s domain.68 These claims must be understood against the background of a discourse of general moral decay and decline

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of the Mughal empire, as well as the threat of the regional Indian states by the emerging British empire. These claims were shared by all the writings of Muslim diplomat-scholars at the time. The scribal elite was aware of the irrevocable withering of the Mughal empire, and those among them with Persian families who had previously served the Safavids had an additional sense of the decline of the Muslim world on a broader scale.69 Mughal and post-Mughal concepts of corruption and ethical norms of public service, therefore, did not differ from European understandings at the time on a basic level. There was a general awareness of the need to separate public and private, as well as political and individual interests. Also, disregarding the multi-layered and overlapping clientelistic networks reaching across regions and cultures in which servants of Indian rulers found themselves, they were expected to live up to standards of loyalty to the dynasty they served. Much suggests, however, that accusations of disloyalty were mainly raised from competing factions when the positions of public agents were weakened due to volatile political situations. In a similar manner, deviations from norms of good governance were mostly punished to eliminate political rivals. Discourses and scandals of corruption were thus used as a tool of power politics and revenge, instead of a legitimisation for a reform of the structures of imperial service or the political system. When Nizam Ali Kh¯an died in 1803 and the ¯ was reinchief minister Azim ol-Omar¯a followed in 1804, Mir Alam stated with British help to the highest position of chief minister. Upon his ceremony of appointment in July 1804, he took revenge by ransacking the personal property of Azim ol-Omar¯a’s family and closest political associates.70 Disregarding a prevalent discourse of corruption in the late Mughal and post-Mughal world, which was perceived as a major reason for imperial decline, no agenda of reform was seriously formulated or implemented.

Company Governance, Public Service and Cross-Cultural Entanglements The crucial question is whether the British metropolitan anticorruption campaigns, as described in the first part of this chapter, could be implemented on the margins of empire, and if so, whether these reforms made a difference to the public service and governance of their counterpart at the Hyderabad court. Metropolitan recruitment of civil servants did not follow qualification but patronage. Nominations were made by the

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24 members of the company’s Court of Directors, who placed their own and leading proprietors’ friends and relatives when posts were available. Over time, these directors thus created a circle of 50–60 “Anglo-Indian” families who were intimately and hereditarily connected to the BEIC.71 Metropolitan recommendations helped candidates to position themselves within professional networks abroad, but the favour of superiors and key positions from which a fortune could be made had to be gained through an individual’s talent, skills, zeal and achievements. Therefore, the imperial career of both Asian and company service people was based on a blend between the two seemingly opposing principles of familial and patronage networks regarding access to the service community and merit-based achievements on the job. In his opening speeches of Hasting’s impeachment in February 1788, Burke strongly criticised the governor general’s favouritism and the corporate complicity between company servants in acts of bribery that jeopardised any system of checks and balances.72 Due to the long distance, the governor general would clearly remain the most important patron for company officials with higher political and diplomatic functions. Yet, while Hastings had been appointed by the company’s Court of Directors and sailed to India in his teenage years,73 his successor Charles Cornwallis (1786–1793) was appointed by national authorities and had earned a reputation for probity in national politics first. Cornwallis was able to implement the new legal regulations of the Parliamentary acts of the 1770s and 1780s regarding private trade and profit. He in turn increased the salaries of company officials74 in order to reduce the temptations to which they were exposed to, regulated advancements by seniority75 and thus introduced some markers of Max Weber’s concept of bureaucracy. British diplomatic agents at Indian courts, so-called residents, basically found themselves in the same situation of cross-cultural double patronage as their Indian counterparts. Until 1800, both the acceptance of a British mission at court and of the individual envoy dispatched depended ultimately on the Nizam’s consent, who expected that a resident had to be aware of Hyderabad’s interests and be “faithful and trusted by both sides”.76 Company servants in the diplomatic service had to acquire local language skills, become familiar with Mughal history, as well as political cultures. Moreover, they had to adapt to local customs and courtly etiquette.77 Disregarding these cross-cultural political entanglements and cultural affinities, the reforms—as implemented by Cornwallis—made a

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difference regarding company officials’ public comportment and identification. While the Hyderabad Residents under Hastings’ governorship in the early 1780s privately had been engaged in the flourishing local diamond trade, disregarding the prohibition by the Regulating Act of 1773, John Kennaway was explicitly forbidden by Cornwallis to pursue such private business.78 Kennaway also no longer used treaty-making for present taking or similar material transactions. By 1792, when he was in charge to lead the peace negotiations of the Triple Alliance between the company, Hyderabad and the Marathas against Mysore, he declined the locally customary “gratuity” of “durbar charges”—a kind of bonus payment for the representatives of the victorious parties after major negotiations.79 Kennaway nevertheless perceived the residency as a rewarding position, because the considerably increased monthly allowance under Cornwallis enabled him to save a handsome sum of money.80 By contrast, both the Hyderabad Chief Minister Azim ol-Omar¯a and the ¯ were granted pensions for life by the London darb¯ ar vakil Mir Alam Court of Directors, as well as gifts from the general governor as rewards for the negotiation of British-Hyderabad alliances.81 The company thus maintained an aggressive policy of patronage and “bribery” towards key officials and intermediaries in the Indian service. This selective implementation of the British anticorruption reforms suggests that its motivation was not a moral policy, but rather an attempt to harness the human resources as well as loyalties of public service and imperial wealth in the national interest. While company servants’ loyalties became increasingly aligned with one political authority, Hyderabad intermediaries continued to be involved in multiple normative orders and cross-cultural interests. This led to an increasingly lopsided cross-cultural network of patronage relations, and eventually the foundation of larger asymmetries in power upon which the expanding British empire could be built. Nonetheless, one of Kennaway’s successors, James Kirkpatrick, amassed a fortune during his residency at Hyderabad (1798–1805), which he never could have gained via the company’s alimony. There is no evidence of illegitimate private trade, emolument through treaty transactions or bribery. Therefore, Kirkpatrick’s wealth must have largely emerged from his marriage with Kheyr on-Nis¯a, the granddaughter of a Hyderabad courtier, and a union that certainly was involved with precious gifts from the local nobility.82 It was not Kirkpatrick’s fortune that caused Governor General Richard Wellesley (1798–1805) to open an investigation that almost disgraced the resident. What Wellesley perceived as damaging the

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reputation of the company83 and consequently “national interests”84 was the resident’s marriage to a local noblewoman. Wellesley claimed that James Kirkpatrick’s love affair had caused a “great scandal among the inhabitants of Hyderabad”,85 but considering the spatial seclusion of the women in the zan¯ ane (harem), the meetings between the resident and Kheyr on-Nis¯a were only possible through the leading women of the zan¯ ane. It is also certain that the Chief Minister Azim ol-Omar¯a and Nizam Ali Kh¯an approved of the connection.86 Therefore, the resident’s intimate relationship could not have been a scandal in the eyes of the local nobility, but instead must have cut across the governor general’s understanding of public comportment and anticorruption policy. While in the early-modern period of merchant companies and trade, Eurasian and Indian companions of European company men had performed important roles for the European participation in coastal commerce, women became excluded as intermediaries with the beginning of the company state-building and the emergence of the Imperial nation-state. This concurrence was no coincidence: this new policy was not motivated by moral reservations against interethnic cohabitations that were still realities of everyday colonial life at the time, and such relations were not legally prohibited. The crucial difference regarding Kheyr onNis¯a made “class” and the political influence and social entanglement her noble birth implied. Favourite women of powerful men at Indian courts built the less visible networks, but they were likewise important political agents for local faction and regional alliance building.87 By all indications, William Kirkpatrick had become a “victim” of local marriage strategies. Considering its dramatic deterioration of political influence, the Hyderabad court dropped reservations of class and sought to counter the new power asymmetries by incorporating the British resident through the strategy of an inter-regional marriage-alliance. It was no coincidence that the residents’ adoption by the Nizam into the ruling dynasty was ceremonially staged upon the signing of the unequal Treaty of 1800, which marked Hyderabad’s political status to a subordinate ally.88 Banning Indian women from political influence might have been related to, but not simply reflected gender practices in Europe. Female influence at European courts was also widely perceived as immoral use of sexual allure,89 and the tendency to separate the private domain of the household from public office and political power grew as a result of the French Revolution.90 However, this was a slow process with temporary setbacks,91 while the anticorruption campaign of the company state in

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the making excluded women’s political agency—right from its beginning. The exclusion of Indian noblewomen from intercultural diplomacy, therefore, must primarily be understood as a specific imperial policy to avoid interethnic entanglements and cross-cultural social obligations, in order to harness national control and imperial wealth in the imperial nationstate’s interest. This argument is corroborated by the fact that Wellesley’s critique of Kirkpatrick’s marriage was embedded in a normative discourse of presumable violations of national honour and reputation. The creation of abstract national identifiers helped to cultivate the self-denying and “noble Company men”,92 whose counterpart can be found in the worldly disinterestedness of religiously and spiritually motivated Asian servants. This anti-female discrimination only marked the beginning of a broader assault on the entanglements with Indian intermediaries, which implied cross-cultural social obligations and patronage-client relations that went beyond the immediate political patronage of the court. The policy of disentanglement from local elites was immediately reflected in the exclusion of Eurasian offspring from official company service by the mid-1790s.93 Nevertheless, Eurasians from upper-class local families and higher company officials still could use their double empowerment, emerging from cross-cultural familial connections to both the residency and the Hyderabad court to pursue specific business and intermediary services.94 James Kirkpatrick had supported the Eurasian son of his close friend, the resident at Pune William Palmer (1798–1801) who was married to local noblewoman Feyz-bakhsh, in establishing a moneylending business. After Kirkpatrick’s death, Charles Metcalfe (1820–1825) took up the position of resident in Hyderabad. He found the Palmer firm to be the chief creditor to the Hyderabad court and even a revenue farmer on lands assigned to pay the company’s subsidiary troops in the service of the Nizam. Metcalfe felt degraded in his authority by the political influence the Palmer firm had at the court, “acting with the double force of the Nizam’s Government and the British name”.95 Although there was nothing illegal in the Palmer company’s business, Metcalfe criminalised its economic and political intermediary services as usurious loans to the Nizam. This triggered a chain of enquiries back to London resulting in the bank’s bankruptcy in 1824.96 Although Metcalf’s attack ultimately targeted the political power and economic business of high-level cross-cultural familial connections, the Palmer affair has gone down in history as one of the last great scandals of corruption in British

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Indian history, while Metcalfe’s intervention—even according to historiography—largely was perceived as a necessary administrative reform in the public interest.97 In his prosecutorial speech, Burke also addressed the “problem” of Indian mediators in company service who would manipulate their ignorant masters to pursue their selfish interests, and hence threatened the national honour of the British government.98 Although metropolitan directions did not directly address the issue of local intermediaries, a strong spirit of mistrust towards Asian monshis, who were employed in the most confidential affairs of company business,99 was transferred to India with the arrival of Cornwallis in 1786.100 No evidence of corruption can be identified in Asian scribes’ transactions in the Hyderabad residency service. By contrast, residents emphasised that their monshis fulfilled the whole range of norms of comportment characterising good and efficient public service—such as trustworthiness, diligence and integrity.101 James Kirkpatrick specifically emphasised his monshi’s “resistance of the great temptations which are constantly before him”.102 Although Azizoll¯ah considerably contributed to the finalising of the unequal treaty of 1800, Wellesley suspected him of undermining the company’s authority by supporting the Nizam’s attempts to establish direct diplomatic ties to the British Crown. In addition, he suggested that the resident was manipulated by the machinations of his Asian intermediary.103 James Kirkpatrick’s successor, Thomas Sydenham, who was aligned to Wellesley’s political views, dismissed Azizoll¯ah by arguing that he was corrupt, and replaced him with Asian agents who did not enjoy the same respect and political agency at the Hyderabad court.104 Such attacks on monshis ultimately were part of the larger, although not legally grounded, anticorruption policy that aimed to separate company men and interests from cross-cultural entanglements with local families, and to eliminate hybrid figures acting as nodes of extended socio-political networks from their intermediary positions. Although this tendency to exclude Indian agents from company office and interests was not motivated by racism, it nevertheless marked the beginning of what Aron Carton coined the “racialization of public virtue”.105 Consequently, corruption became increasingly identified with Indian agency as well as Indian customs and cultures.106

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Anglo-French Inter-Imperial Rivalries and the Nationalisation of Public Virtue Socio-political entanglements across cultures were not the only form of interactions on the fringes of the empire that fed back to the national anticorruption discourses. In a similar way, the fierce Anglo-French rivalries in South Asia, which were specifically fuelled in the context of global wars, led to the creation of national concepts of public virtue as well. The Compagnie des Indes under Governor Joseph François Dupleix was the first European enterprise in India that, in the context of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), sought to find in territorial revenue a source of money and with the support of military forces began to diplomatically interfere in regional politics.107 In the turmoil of the Seven Years’ War, however, France lost all her territorial acquisitions in India and, in 1762, was reduced to a mercantile enterprise with her former coastal trading posts again.108 When France—in the context of the American Revolutionary War—sought to restore its political influence in the East Indies, it had to rely on the intermediary services of French military entrepreneurs who had embarked on a career in the service of Indian rulers.109 French alliance building with Indian rulers against the British largely failed because the French expeditionary corps arrived much too late on the scene. Nevertheless, the supreme commander of the expeditionary forces, Marquis de Bussy, blamed the French military entrepreneurs by arguing that they did not have the necessary character to act as diplomatic agents on behalf of France, as they were solely motivated by their private interests.110 These Frenchmen certainly aimed to improve their standing with Indian courts by mediating an alliance with France, but this simply represented the local custom of multiple patronages. This mistrust towards hybrid intermediary figures even increased in Revolutionary France, particularly since the bloody insurrection in the French region of the Vendée led to an atmosphere of ubiquitous Jacobin suspicion of counter-revolutionary agency. After the Revolutionary Wars broke out, the French military entrepreneur Michel Raymond, who had climbed to eminence at the Hyderabad court and was in command of one of the strongest bodies of troops in South Asia, introduced himself to the French authorities in the East Indies as “concitoyen”,111 offering his cooperation in a new war.112 Rumours circulating in the French settlements on the coast that Raymond’s plans would subvert French national interests soon led to an interruption of the diplomatic approaches, as well

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as correspondence between Raymond and the French authorities.113 The increasing nationalisation and bureaucratisation of the French state service ultimately cut France off from its last remaining diplomatic intermediaries, which were necessary to resume an imperial vision of a territorial power in the East Indies in the shadows of the Revolutionary Wars. Nevertheless, the British resident in Hyderabad, William Kirkpatrick,114 and Governor General Wellesley represented such Frenchmen as Indian bridgeheads of Revolutionary France. Their reports alarmed national government authorities such that they supported Wellesley’s imperialistic and preventive wars against Indian adversaries, as well as the implementation of subsidiary alliances with Indian rulers all over the subcontinent.115 These unequal treaties were also characterised by what can be termed as a national “discriminatory policy” that basically emerged from Anglo-French imperial rivalries, and aimed to terminate French influence on Indian politics. When Raymond died in 1798 under highly suspicious circumstances, Wellesley took this opportunity to negotiate the disbandment of the French Corps in Hyderabad and, generally, the exclusion of all Europeans from service with the Nizam.116 The British company state, therefore, not only nationalised its own public service, but also put an end to Hyderabad’s and other Indian states’ customary multi-cultural and hybrid service culture. The long-standing Anglo-French inter-imperial rivalries that took an ever-fiercer edge with the Revolutionary Wars, implying an ideological conflict between two different political ideologies, thus shaped the emerging imperial nation-states’ understandings of corruption and the nationalisation of public service. The founding of the Imperial Service College, originally initiated by Governor General Wellesley, must be understood against this backdrop. In his Notes with Respect to the Foundation of a College at Fort William (1800), Wellesley elaborated on his plans to create a specific college for the uniform training of an imperial civil service corps—another marker of Weber’s concept of rational government. The Notes were couched in a novel language of modern imperialism and claimed that “good Government” was to be the primary concern in India, which would require a corporate identity and public integrity through an institutionalised training at a college.117 Wellesley’s warning that the “College must stand or the Empire must fall”118 must partly be understood as continuous concerns regarding the “Oriental” temptations company men were exposed to. On the other hand, they should mainly be viewed as anxieties that Jacobite doctrines of Revolutionary France

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would corrupt their minds.119 While the British abolishment of “old corruption” in the metropolitan administration was a slow and gradual process that took until as late as 1848, the French Revolution abolished the vénalité des offices (sale of offices) as well as privileges of land taxation in 1789 in one fell swoop and introduced the principle of meritocracy into public service.120 In his writings on India and Revolutionary France, Burke had connected concerns regarding “Oriental” and Jacobite corruption of imperial agents. He perceived the newly enriched nabobish upstarts, which he described as men of talent but no traditional property, as more vulnerable to be corrupted by revolutionary ideas, particularly the new meritocratic principles.121 By the turn of the century, the fear that company servants—through inter-imperial contacts—could become carriers of revolutionary ideas migrating through their mobile lives to the heart of the nation, appeared to have replaced anxieties regarding “Oriental corruption”. Considering that no more than a handful Jacobins could be found among the company servants in India, combined with the weak French position in the East Indies, such concerns appear likewise considerably exaggerated.122 British national authorities supported Wellesley’s idea of a uniform training of company men. Yet, to increase the metropolitan grip on company service, the Imperial Service College (founded in 1806) was established in Britain—not Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). Anglo-French inter-imperial rivalries on the margins of empire not only influenced nationalised concepts of public virtue but also led to the first worldwide training institution for state service. Therefore, state service in the eastern empire, in many aspects, was more modern than in Britain.123

Conclusion The reform of imperial governance and service was basically connected to national political discourses against old corruption, modern European state-building processes and—as Moisés Prieto shows in his contribution to Spanish America—to ideas of the Enlightenment. Reforms of imperial governance can be described as part of a larger European-wide transformation of state service and politics from the early-modern to the modern period. These processes can best be understood by Hillard von Thiessen’s concept of Normenkonkurrenz (competing normative orders). Whereas in the early-modern period the religious, the public (gemeinwohlorientiert ) and the social (clientelism) normative orders were equally

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represented and were overlapping and competing with one another,124 the emerging modern nation-states can be characterised by their striving to disentangle these normative orders and to strengthen public norms of comportment through laws, bureaucratisation and abstract national identifiers. Violations of public service-based norms became increasingly labelled as corruption.125 The French Revolution enabled the abrupt abolition of the old regime’s corrupt institutions, and France became increasingly a centralised “nation-state with imperial extensions”126 that was carrying its national standards of governance to the fringes of the empire. By contrast, the struggle against British “old corruption” was a slow process and the reform of company governance did not simply reflect European enlightened ideas, nor can it be understood as a transfer of a modern metropolitan model to the “peripheries”. Also, we do not find different basic conceptions and forms of corruption in South Asia before the reforms, neither on the part of company servants, nor on the part of the Mughal and post-Mughal scribal communities. The scandalisation of colonial corruption must largely be identified as social-conservative and xenophobic metropolitan responses to forms of corruption that were emerging from the specific cross-cultural and inter-imperial exchanges and entanglements on the ground. The old elites in Britain perceived the new rich nabobish upstarts, who climbed to social and political eminence at home through the way of imperial service, as a threat to the traditional social order and as particularly vulnerable to alien ideas—both of “Oriental” and French Revolutionary kind. British imperial anticorruption policy in South Asia was strongly directed against Indian noble families and crucial intermediary agents, aiming to cut them from profit and political influence in favour of national interest groups. These attacks were largely not legally grounded and mainly addressed cross-cultural entanglements implying socio-political and material obligations for Indian communities. Social disentanglement from public office could be easier implemented in the colonial than in the national context because Indian agents were not represented in national politics, and the interethnic character of such relations enabled—from a metropolitan perspective—a policy of difference and “othering”. Nevertheless, as Anubha Anushree shows elsewhere in this volume, British imperial policy of the early nineteenth century continuously struggled to establish a professional and personal disentanglement of company

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servants from Indians, as several cases of scandalised cross-cultural relations reveal. The BEIC’s anticorruption reforms laid the foundation of a language of modern imperialism, stereotypes of “oriental” corruption and the civilising mission, as early as 1800. As Kroeze argues in his analysis of the early twentieth century Dutch empire, through such a racialisation of public virtue, corruption increasingly became identified with native agency and continuous legitimisation for the presumably superior colonial governance. The successes and failures of state- and empire-building in South Asia in this period of transition from pre-modern to modern times can at least be partly explained by the normative orders imperial servicemen followed. The British company found a way to harness its diplomatic agents for public interest without depriving them of the necessary flexibility to operate cross-cultural patronage networks. The Asian intermediaries in the service of Hyderabad, by contrast, bound their material and social interests strongly to British cooperation, which resulted in a subordinate alliance. The strict French nationalisation of state service ultimately deprived French authorities of the only intermediary group through which a re-assumption of French global power policy in the East Indies could have taken place. The issue of harnessing human resources overseas remained crucial for the rise and fall of empires. Whereas the Dutch metropolitan institutions, as shown by Kroeze in this volume, likewise mobilised control over its colonial servants in Indonesia, they never managed to counter the excesses and fragile condition of its administrators. Finally, the anticorruption reform of the BEIC’s imperial service corroborates the postcolonial critique of the dominant narrative of a diffusionist modernisation from the metropolis to the peripheries, and the “first in Europe then elsewhere” periodisation. The problematising of colonial corruption emerging from cross-cultural entanglements and Anglo-French inter-imperial rivalries caused the creation of presumably national norms of governance. The birth of modern Britain, therefore, must be understood as a complex agglomeration and multi-layered history of an imperial nation-state in the making.

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Notes 1. Christina Smylitopoulos, “Portrait of a Nabob: Graphic Satires, Portraiture, and the Anglo-Indian in the Late Eighteenth Century,” ACAR: revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review 37 (January 2012). 2. Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in EighteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 11– 14. 3. Philip Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 4. Peter J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 64. 5. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). This binary divide was even more pronounced in the French historiography by the obsession with domestic causes and consequences of the French Revolution, relegating colonial issues to the periphery of French history. David Todd, “French Imperial Meridian, 1814–1870,” Past and Present 210 (February 2011). 6. Dipesh Chakrabarty calls to transcend the “First in Europe then elsewhere”—periodisation with his imperative of “provincializing Europe” by thinking about “political modernity” beyond endogenous European intellectual traditions and history: Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 7. Antony G. Hopkins, “Back to the Future? From National History to Imperial History,” Past and Present 164 (August 1999). 8. The best studied topics are migration, global labour, long-distance commerce, circuits of productions, distribution and consumption. 9. Huw V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics 1757–1773 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 39– 42. 10. Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750– 1850 (London: Harper Perennial, 2006), 34. 11. Clive correctly understood this legal regulation as a personal rebuke. Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 16–18. 12. Dirks, Scandal of Empire, 18–21 and 93–95; Mithi Mukherjee, “Justice, War, and the Imperium: India and Britain in Edmund Burke’s Prosecutorial Speeches in the Impeachment Trial of Warren Hastings,” Law and History Review 23 (Fall 2005): 589–590. 13. Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth Century Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 365–367.

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14. Dirks, Scandal of Empire, 16–18 and 54–59; George K. McGilvary, East India Patronage and the British State (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2008), 31–33. 15. Sutherland, East India Company, 149–256; McGilvary, East India Patronage, 31–33; Nechtman, Nabobs, 82. 16. James Epstein, Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic During the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 4–5. 17. For a detailed account, see Eric J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain 1783–1870 (Essex: Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1996), 15–19. 18. Harling, ‘Old Corruption’ , 1–20. 19. Sunil Agnani, “Jacobinism in India, Indianism in English Parliament: Fearing the Enlightenment and Colonial Modernity with Edmund Burke,” Cultural Critique 68 (Winter 2008); Eddy Kent, Corporate Character: Representing Imperial Power in British India, 1786–1901 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 34; Dirks, Scandal of Empire, 12–13. 20. Peter J. Marshall, “British Society in India Under the East India Company,” Modern Asian Studies 31 (February 1997): 96–98. 21. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 7–9 and 130. 22. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Unwyn Hyman, 1989); Colley, Britons, 120–132. 23. Epstein, Scandal, 8–9; Robert Travers, “A British Empire by Treaty in Eighteenth-Century India,” in Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600–1900, ed. Saliha Belmessous (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 151–153. 24. Peter J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 160–161 and 203–205; Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in The Eighteenth Century, ed. Peter J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 2. 25. Dirks, Scandal of Empire; Nechtman, Nabobs, 57–59. 26. Peter J. Marshall, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. 6: India: The Launching of the Hastings Impeachment 1786–1788 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 6: 287. 27. Ibid., 346. 28. Barbara N. Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 24. 29. For a typology of the transformation from Mughal province to de facto autonomous “little kingdom”, see Richard Barnett’s pioneering study

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30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

North India Between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals and the British, 1720– 1801 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1987), 20–22. N. R. Farooqui, “Diplomacy and Diplomatic Procedure Under the Mughals,” The Medieval History Journal 7 (April 2004): 59–63. Gulfishan Khan, Indian Muslim Perceptions of the West During the Eighteenth Century (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 6. C. H. Alexandrowicz, An Introduction to the History of the Law of Nations in the East Indies (16th, 17th and 18th Centuries) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 15. M. A. Nayeem, Mughal Administration of Deccan Under Nizamul Mulk Asaf Jah (1720–1748) (Bombay: Jaico Publ. House, 1985). Sunil Chander, “From a Pre-colonial Order to a Princely State: Hyderabad in Transition, c. 1784–1865” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1987), 20–23, 47–77 and 573; Karen Leonard, “The Hyderabad Political System and Its Participants,” Journal of Asian Studies 30 (May 1970/1971): 571–572. Christopher A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 16. Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Peter J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). Tanja Bührer, “Intercultural Diplomacy at the Court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, 1770–1815,” The International History Review 41 (November 2018). Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Michael H. Fisher, “Diplomacy in India, 1526–1858,” in Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Oceans Worlds, c. 1550–1850, eds. Huw V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke and John G. Reid (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Scribal Migrations in Early Modern India,” in Routledge Handbook of the South Asian Diaspora, eds. Joya Chatterji and David Washbrook (London: Routledge, 2013), 35. Khan, Indian Muslim Perceptions, 19 and 71; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite Migration and Early Modern State Formation,” Journal of Asian Studies 51 (May 1992). Munis D. Faruqui, “At Empire’s End: The Nizam, Hyderabad and Eighteenth-Century India,” Modern Asian Studies 43 (January 2009): 10; Karen Leonard, Social History of an Indian Caste: The Kayasths of Hyderabad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 6–35.

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44. The term monshi is of Arabic origin and denotes a variety of functions such as writer, scribe, secretary, tutor, teacher, language master, author and prose composer. The meaning of the term changed significantly over time. Since the early seventeenth century, monshis had primarily been mentioned as working in the imperial bureau of correspondence. Drafting documents of official court and intra-court communications required highly specialised knowledge of forms and meanings. Outstanding monshis were often involved in war and diplomacy as well. Only a few individuals mastered the comprehensive professional and cultural package of a truly adept monshi necessary to reach into key positions of a powerful household. The British generally referred to their professional Asian scribes in their administrative and diplomatic service as monshis. Charles Morrison, “Munshis and Their Masters: The Organization of an Occupational Relationship in the Indian Legal System,” The Journal of Asian Studies 31 (March 2011): 309; Bernhard S. Cohn, ed., Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 18; Rajeev Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 84–94. 45. Chandar Bhan was born towards the end of Akbar’s reign (1556–1605) and spent his career during the reigns of Jah¯angir (1605–1628), Sh¯ah Jah¯an (1628–1658) and under that of the last of the “great” Mughals, Owrang-zib (Aurangzeb) (1658–1707). 46. In what follows, I rely on the thorough analysis of Kinra, Writing Self , 3 and 60–71. 47. He witnessed the administrative chaos of early company administration in Bengal, and his family became victim of its land resettlements. Gholam Hoseyn Kh¯an’s observations therefore were coloured by a sense of loss, displacement and bitterness. Khan, Indian Muslim Perceptions. 48. Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai, The Seir Mutaqherin, or View of Modern Times: Being a History of India, trans. Nota-Manus (Calcutta: White, 1789), 547–612. 49. Kinra, Writing Self , 61–79. 50. Burke likewise strongly criticised the individual greed of company officials. 51. Gholam Hoseyn Kh¯an probably was the first to formulate the doctrine of the drain of wealth from India to Europe. Kanta Ray, “Indian Society and the Establishment of British Supremacy, 1765–1818,” in The Eighteenth Century, ed. Peter J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 2: 510–511. 52. Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, 547–612. Compare Khan, Indian Muslim Perceptions, 60–64.

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¯ is documented in detail in the chronology 53. The biography of Mir Alam ¯ ushtari. Tohfat ol- Alam written by his cousin and protégé Abdollatif Sh¯ Abdollatif Sh¯ ushtari, Tohfat ol- ¯ Alam, written in Hyderabad 1802; lithographed in Bombay (present-day Mumbai) 1847. 54. Kennaway to Ross and Cornwallis, 15th August and 10th October 1788, in DRO, 961M 1/B/6, 26–28 and 42–43. 55. Sarojini Regani, Nizam-British-Relations, 1724–1857 (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Relations, 1963), 145. 56. Kennaway to Cornwallis, 10th October 1788, in DRO, 961M 1/B/6, 42–43; James Kirkpatrick to Malcolm, 4th August 1799, in BL, IOR Mss Eur F228/53, 25–26; William Kirkpatrick to Hobart, 27th May 1795, in ibid./4, 32–33. The Maratha vakil, Govind Kishen, believed ¯ apart from ‘Azim ol-Omar¯a’, was the only court official that Mir Alam, with the necessary qualifications to fill the position of chief minister. 57. James to William Kirkpatrick, 18th May 1800, in BL, IOR Mss Eur F228/12, 42–43. 58. Sh¯ ushtari, Tohfat ol- ¯ Alam, 162. ¯ to Cornwallis, 28th January 1789, in NAI, SC 1789, 397– 59. Mir Alam 399. 60. Sh¯ ushtari, Tohfat ol- ¯ Alam, 159. 61. Cornwallis to Kennaway, 19th March 1790, in NAI, SC 1790, 322–327. 62. Ibid., 163. 63. Hyderabad Correspondence, in BL, IOR/H/563, 137. ¯ and the 64. Translation of a part of a conversation between Mir Alam residency monshi Azizoll¯ah, 26th August 1796, in NAI, SC 1796, 1768–1783. 65. William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in EighteenthCentury India (London: Harper Press, 2002), 195–199. 66. Correspondence between Wellesley and James Kirkpatrick concerning treaty negotiations with the Nizam, in BL, IOR/H/640:1800, 748– 756. 67. Sh¯ ushtari, Tohfat ol- ¯ Alam, 156–159. 68. Ibid., 156–157. 69. Khan, Indian Muslim Perceptions, 100–101. 70. Regani, Nizam-British Relations, 186–191. 71. Jacob Thiessen, “Anglo-Indian Vested Interests and Civil Service Education, 1800–1858: Indications of an East India Company Line,” Journal of World History 5 (Spring 1994): 32–44. 72. Marshall, Writings and Speeches, 284–290. 73. McGilvary, East India Patronage, 32–33. 74. They were very well paid, even in comparison with British officials. Marshall, “British Society,” 99. 75. Dirks, Scandal of Empire, 21–22.

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76. Letter from Nizam Ali Khan, recorded by the Calcutta Board on 9th August 1785, in NAI, SC 1785, 2160. 77. Fisher, “Diplomacy in India,” 250. 78. Kennaway to Ross, 13th October 1788, in DRO, 961M/6, 46–48; Kennaway to Ross, 26th November 1788, in ibid., 73–75. 79. Statement of what passed at the different conferences held with Tipu’s wakils, in BL, IOR/H/391a, 29. 80. Kennaway to U. Kennaway, 8th August 1788, in DRO, 23–26; Kennaway to William Kirkpatrick, 10th May 1788, in ibid., 4. 81. Cornwallis to Kennaway, 19th March 1790, in NAI, SC 1790, 322–327; Regani, Nizam-British Relations, 187. 82. Durba Gosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 73; Dalrymple, White Mughals, 258. 83. William to James Kirkpatrick, 26th December 1801, in BL, Mss Eur F228/18, 38–39. 84. James to William Kirkpatrick, 16th January 1801, in BL, IOR Mss Eur F228/13, 4. 85. Malcolm to William Kirkpatrick, 2nd December 1801, in BL, Mss Eur F228/83, 17–18. 86. James Achilles Kirkpatrick to Wellesley, Hyderabad, 12th October 1800, in BL, IOR/H/640:1800, 951–952. 87. Gosh, Sex and the Family, 75–76; Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 75–76. 88. James Achilles Kirkpatrick to Wellesley, Hyderabad, 12th October 1800, in BL, IOR/H/640:1800, 951–952. 89. Claudia Opitz-Belakhal, “Von der politischen Einflussnahme der Frauen am Hof zur bürgerlichen Häuslichkeit? Überlegungen zum Wandel der Geschlechterbeziehungen um 1800,” in Das Geschlecht der Diplomatie: Geschlechterrollen in den Aussenbeziehungen vom Spätmittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Corina Bastian, Eva Kathrin Dade, Hillard von Thiessen and Christian Windler (Köln: Böhlau, 2013), 133–136. 90. Corina Bastian, Eva Kathrin Dade, Hillard von Thiessen and Christian Windler, “Einleitung,” in Das Geschlecht der Diplomatie: Geschlechterrollen in den Aussenbeziehungen vom Spätmittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Corina Bastian, Eva Kathrin Dade, Hillard von Thiessen and Christian Windler (Köln: Böhlau, 2013), 9–11. 91. Opitz-Belakhal, “Einflussnahme der Frauen,” 141. 92. Kent, Corporate Character, 53. 93. Peter J. Marshall, “The Whites of British India, 1780–1830: A Failed Colonial Society?” The International History Review 12 (February 1990): 36; Adrian Carton, Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India:

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94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99.

100.

101.

102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

108. 109. 110.

Changing Concepts of Hybridity Across Empires (London: Routledge, 2012), 38. Company officials so far had treated their children with native women as members of the family, and had assumed that Eurasian boys could be transformed to upright Englishmen by education and partly by class. Peter Robb, “Children, Emotion, Identity and Empire: Views from the Blechyndens’ Calcutta Diaries (1790–1822),” Modern Asian Studies 40 (February 2006): 177–190. Karen Leonard, “Palmer and Company: An India Banking Firm in Hyderabad State,” Modern Asian Studies 47 (July 2013): 1178–1183. Leonard, “Palmer and Company,” 1172. Ibid., 1169–1183. Zubaida Yazdani, Hyderabad During the Residency of Henry Russell, 1811–1820: A Case Study of the Subsidiary Alliance System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), and more recently Anthony Webster, The Richest East India Merchant: The Life and Business of John Palmer of Calcutta, 1767 –1835 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), 104–109. Marshall, Writings and Speeches, 292–294. James to William Kirkpatrick, 31st January 1799, in BL, IOR Mss Eur F228/11, 49–54; 25th April 1800, in BL, IOR Mss Eur F228/12, 4–7, quote: 6. John W. Kaye, The Life and Correspondence of Major-General Sir John Malcolm: Late Envoy to Persia, and Governor of Bombay; from Unpublished Letters and Journals (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1856), 1: 23. Kennaway to Malet, 29th March 1790, in NAI, SC 1790, 497–502; Russell to Barlow, 20th November 1805, in BL, IOR MssEur F228/51, 6–7; William Kirkpatrick to Shore, 22nd February 1787, in BL, IOR Mss Eur F228/1, 8–9. James to William Kirkpatrick, in BL, IOR Mss Eur F228/12, 259–260. William to James Kirkpatrick, in BL, IOR H/640:1800, 36. Henry George Briggs, The Nizam: The History and Relations with the British Government (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1861), 16–17. Carton, Mixed-Race, 29–31. Dirks, Scandal of Empire, 1–5. Philippe Haudrère, La Compagnie Française des Indes au XVIIIe siècle (1719–1795) (Paris: Librairie de l’Inde éditeur, 1989), 3: 994; Siba P. Sen, The French in India 1763–1816 (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1971), 27–29. For a detailed account see: Sen, French in India, 27–80; Regani, NizamBritish Relations, 18–120. Sen, French in India, 17–19, 56–65 and 71–72. Bussy to de Castries, 13th February 1784, in ANOM, B/420, no page.

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111. Raymond to de Fresne, 29th December 1791, in ANOM, 22MIOM/36, 1563, 177. 112. Ibid., 176. 113. Rayomond to de Fresne, 4th October 1792, in Sarkar, “General Raymond,” 107–108. 114. William Kirkpatrick was the elder half-brother of James Achilles Kirkpatrick and was resident of Hyderabad from 1795 to 1798. 115. Stig Förster, Die mächtigen Diener der East India Company: Ursachen und Hintergründe der britischen Expansionspolitik in Südasien, 1793– 1819 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992), 120–146. 116. Subsidiary Treaty with the Nizam, September 1798 in C. U. Aitchison, ed., A Collection of Treaties, Engagements, and Sanads Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries (Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch, 1929–1933), vol. 9. 117. Kent, Corporate Character, 67–70; John Bowen, “The East India Company’s Education of Its Own Servants,” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 3/4 (October 1955): 105–108; Thiessen, “Civil Service Education,” 39–44. 118. Thiessen, “Civil Service Education,” 37. 119. Marshall, “Whites of British India,” 31–32. 120. Harling, ‘Old Corruption’; William Doyle, Venality: The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 121. Agnani, “Jacobinism in India,” 131–162. 122. Marshall, “Whites of British India,” 32. 123. Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 277. 124. Hillard von Thiessen, “Normenkonkurrenz. Handlungsspielräume, Rollen, normativer Wandel und normative Kontinuität vom späten Mittelalter bis zum Übergang zur Moderne,” in Normenkonkurrenz in historischer Perspektive, eds. Arne Karsten and Hillard von Thiessen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2015). 125. Jens I. Engels, “Vom vergeblichen Streben nach Eindeutigkeit: Normenkonkurrenz in der europäischen Moderne,” in Normenkonkurrenz in historischer Perspektive, eds. Arne Karsten and Hillard von Thiessen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2015), 218–222. 126. Matthias Middell and Meghan Maruschke, “Explaining Revolutionary Upheaval: From Internal Societal Developments to Global Processes of Respatialization,” in The French Revolution as a Moment of Respatialization, eds. Matthias Middell and Meghan Maruschke (Berlin: The Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019), 1–19, quote: 10.

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CHAPTER 4

The East India Company and the Regulation of Corruption in Early-Nineteenth-Century India Anubha Anushree

In 1834 Charles Middleton was suspended and eventually dismissed from the East India civil services on charges of forgery and impropriety. Even as the investigation found nothing concrete to support the claim that Middleton, a senior judge in the then abolished Provincial Court of Calcutta, had been “influenced by any dishonourable motives,” he was nevertheless reproached by the East India Company (the Company) directors for “the want of proper precaution and by his unaccountable supineness.”1 Writing to the government on 21 April, 1834, Bushby— Middleton’s supervisor—complained of Middleton’s negligent behaviour, as that which “involved the reputation as well as the interests of the Government” and “reflected seriously on the character and conduct of British justice and courts.”2

A. Anushree (B) Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Kroeze et al. (eds.), Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era, Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9_4

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In the same year, Mordaunt Ricketts, the British agent to Lucknow, was also dismissed from the Company services. The investigation by his successor, James Lockett, remained inconclusive and failed to provide definitive proof of wrongdoing. The Board of Directors dismissed Ricketts on charges of corruption and embezzlement of funds after a convoluted and eventually aborted investigation that involved three Residents, six bankers, and fourteen Indian officers, not to mention a host of people in Lucknow, Calcutta, and London. Refusing Ricketts’s resignation, the Board expressed its outrage in the following way: “We direct that this dismissal be promulgated in the most public manner for the information both of our servants and of the people of Oude, where he so unworthily represented the British Government.”3 More famously, the Company dismissed Sir James Edward Colebrooke on charges of “encouraging and supporting a system of bribery, corruption and intrigue.”4 Spanning nearly eight years (from roughly 1825 to 1832), the investigation involved five significant British officers—Edward Colebrooke, Charles Metcalfe, George Trevelyan, Henry Cavendish, and David Ochterlony—along with scores of Indians such as the former King of Nagpur, Appa Saheb and his court. The charge against Colebrooke rested on the rather indeterminate perception of Colebrook as someone who showed “undue bias” towards Ram Gopal, a diwan in the Delhi Resident.5 For Trevelyan, the principal investigator and whistle-blower in the case, the issue was not just prevention of a “highly objectionable and dangerous kind of forgery but also to vindicate the honour of the government and the national character.” Trevelyan insisted that “the investigation was not undertaken [by me] in my official capacity as Assistant Resident but on my own sole responsibility as a servant of the government generally and as an Englishman.”6 How should we interpret the dismissal of Colebrooke, Middleton, and Ricketts? After all, corruption and misdemeanour were not new to the Company. Ironically enough, the investigating officers involved in these cases such as Trevelyan, Metcalfe, Bushby, Maddock, and Lockett were all eventually embroiled in one or the another case of corruption and misconduct. As Jonathan Saha, Xavier Huetz De Lemps, and Pol Dalmau show in different contexts, corruption in the colonies—far from being exceptional—was pervasive.7 In fact, the very genesis of the Company was steeped in salacious stories of corruption and impropriety even as every charter and every Parliamentary decree claimed clarity of conscience and

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faith. As early as 1688, Sir Josiah Child—one of the Company chartists— alluded to how the formation of the Company was a way of legalising and sanitising what could be called individual corruption.8 At the same time, describing and defining public conduct became progressively salient to the Company power with its commercial expansion. K. N. Chaudhuri’s The English East India Company (1965), Robert Travers’s Ideology and Empire (2007), and Philip Stern’s work The Company State (2011) have dealt with the early-modern corporate character of the Company in great detail and demonstrated how commercial and political interests went hand-in-hand.9 Even as their work has enriched the expanding scholarship on the Company and the successive British empire, there is not much discussion of how the Company’s specific corporate characteristics also encouraged a certain moral world view or, in turn, were conditioned by the cultural and moral ecology of Britain and India. It is for this reason that we need to turn to the so-called instances of moral depravity, the moments of political perversity and lapses that defined the Company and its sovereign successor. For it is through the attention to terms such as corruption that we understand the ways in which the Company and, in fact, the British empire came to establish such a long and enduring shadow. While the study of the British empire and its parallel European colonies have focused on how the empires were shaped by events and notions, how they in turn defined ideologies and mentalities, there is very little by way of thinking about what the empires proscribed, prohibited, hid and, thus, wrote out of their political credo.10 In defining what empires are, we tend to overlook what they aren’t and it is to this elusive moral negative that we need to turn to in order to understand the continuing legacies of empires and imperialisms in the modern world. The purpose of this paper is thus to trace the vicissitudes of the term “corruption” in early-nineteenth-century colonial South Asia, to understand how the Company repurposed and deployed the term to produce colonial moral authority. I am interested in the Company’s production of the vocabulary and rhetoric of corruption as a singular vice—both in the sense of being exceptional and separated—as a deliberate tactic of distancing and localising what Nicholas Dirks has called “the scandal of empire.”11 British corruption was projected as moral lapse—a result of the scheming influences of the local population. On the other hand, the “native” assistants and officers were depicted as naturally corrupt

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and collectively immoral. This chapter studies three examples to show that, for the Company, containing corruption did not necessarily mean restricting it; regulating corruption meant managing perceptions and public opinion. The way the board justified the outright dismissals of Colebrooke, Middleton, and Ricketts, exemplified in the quotes above, make it very apparent that the British were more concerned about their honour and public image to Indians—a redundant exercise in selfirony—than in really resolving the complex mercantile and administrative apparatus of interdependence that scaffolded the Company. By regulating and appropriating transactions and collaborations between the colonial officers and their indigenous assistants, the British secured legitimacy in London and Calcutta, eschewing any challenge to the territorial and moral structures of colonial expansion. R. Kroeze’s chapter highlights the specific racial mobilisation of the term “corruption” in the context of early-twentieth-century Dutch empire.12 He underscores how the necessity of colonialism allowed for a continuation of corrupt practices even as it “maintained and legitimised colonial rule.”13 Corruption was a double-edged useful rhetoric that presented the indigenous systems and communities as dysfunctional on one hand and proved the superiority and necessity of colonial rule on the other. However, even as one agrees with the broader arguments of the article, this paper steps away from thinking about corruption in functional terms. Instead of investigating how corruption strengthened racial and colonial dichotomies, this chapter shows that the issue of corruption complicated the colonial logic of racial binaries. Even as regulation of corruption was making tenuous and clarifying the relations between the colonisers and the colonised, in many ways it was also a project of disciplining the British as well. I first focus on eighteenth and nineteenth century notions of corruption, namely Thomas Macaulay’s speech to situate the discourse of Company corruption within an intellectual milieu. Macaulay, the first Law Member of the Company Board (1834–1838), formulated a racial morality where corruption amongst the British was presented as a natural corollary to the exceptionality of colonialism. I then investigate the three specific instances of corruption mentioned above to explore some of the ambiguities that shaped the official rhetoric on corruption.

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The Discourse of Company Corruption Corruption is often projected as the breakdown of law. However, corruption is better described as the continuance of lawlessness within the law. In other words, corruption occurs only within a legal system and the very fact of its detection signifies the continuity of law. Further, the possibility of corruption continually shapes the forms of accountability practices within legal institutions giving rise to more complicated regulatory mechanisms. In the context of colonial Burma (present-day Myanmar), Jonathan Saha has argued how the British colonial efforts to curb corruption often “empower(ed) certain state actors to police and enforce the laws, but often in the process empowering them to turn this authority to their own advantage.”14 Drawing from versatile studies of colonial laws, Saha argues that institutional incoherence and disorders were critical to the stabilization and consolidation of colonial legal regimes.15 Studying corruption as a form of political perversion is instructive since it allows us to track two salient and interconnected features of modern states. First, studying corruption allows one to see how modern states function by rendering all relations transparent. Transparency, whether between citizens and the state or between different institutions is a crucial feature of modern states. The desire for state transparency underwrites all social relations into sanctioned, documented, and publicly proclaimed language of the law. Studying corruption also allows one to enter the vocabulary of economic sovereignty and its integral role in the formation of modern states. Modern corruption, more than moral perversion, is a breakdown in the state-dictated relationship with capital. Modern states emerged by abrogating to themselves the authority to regulate and legitimise markets and finances. That which does not follow the supposedly transparent logic of state-dictated circulation of capital is designated as corrupt. The limiting of the discourse of corruption to the language of economy is indicative of the desire for transparency as well as the centrality of certain forms of financial control for modern states. However, the narrowing of corruption to construe financial misdemeanour does not mean that corruption has lost moral meaning, but rather morality itself has come to be described in monetary terms. Nineteenth-century British colonial ideals were very much entrenched in valorising sobriety, industry, modesty, and prudence as economic values. Societies and cultures that did not follow such fiscal temperance came

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to be described as naturally corrupt. What is surprising is that this very colonial discourse of corruption continues to shape the contemporary international vocabulary of acceptable and unacceptable political conduct. Thus, today we only hear about only scandals from Western Europe and North America which are construed as anomalous, unnatural misbehaviour that is even cathartic to these societies. At the same time, the Asian, South American, and African narratives continue to portray corruption in these societies as systemic, hidden, seductive, and monstrous.16 The hierarchy between scandal as specific deviance and corruption as general pathology was not new. Defending the continuance of the Company charter in 1833, Macaulay makes a similar distinction. It is true that the early history of this great revolution is chequered with guilt and shame. It is true that the founders of our Indian empire too often abused the strength which they derived from superior energy and superior knowledge. It is true that with some of the highest qualities of the race from which they sprang, they combined some of the worse defects of the race over which they ruled. How should it have been otherwise? Born in humble stations, accustomed to earn a slender maintenance by obscure industry, they found themselves transformed in a few months from clerks drudging over desks…into statesmen and generals with armies at their command They were what it was natural that men should be who had been raised by so rapid an ascent to so dizzy and eminence…they committed errors natural to rulers who were but imperfectly acquainted with the language and manners of their subjects.17

Macaulay’s defence of renewing the charter was premised on the exceptionality of Company history. This long quote from Macaulay features three claims that were indicative of the nineteenth-century British ideas of colonial corruption. The first was that corruption was a result of anomalous historical situations. The exceptionality of colonial power demanded extraordinary knowledge and energy that lead to excesses. The second was that corruption was a consequence of the influence of indigenous inferior systems. The third was the assertion that civilisational progress demands time and knowledge. The corruption of the initial days was the result of sudden changes in the fortunes of the Company servants, who were unfamiliar with their national cultural and moral values as well the cultures and values of the colonised. This could be easily rectified by educating young

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officers in national culture, by instilling British pride in the superiority of their morals over Indians. Macaulay’s idealisation of the Company did not end with the early history of its conquest of India. For him, this historical chaos had been transformed into a new order of civil and military functionaries guided by collective temperance and governmental diligence. They “revere and delight in the honourable poverty” and “after ruling millions of subjects, after commanding victorious armies, after administering revenues of great provinces…return to their native land with no more than a decent competence.”18 Celebrating fiscal moderation as morality was a remarkable move towards justifying empire. The Company service, Macaulay claimed, had weaned its civilians away from the career of licentiousness and malfeasance towards abstinence and self-regulation. This was a significant change in the rhetoric around Company services. In less than two decades, the Company service had gone from being a conduit of sociological degradation—the nabobs,19 for example—to become a source of moral amelioration and national consolidation for the British. Further, in characterising corruption as an “excess,” Macaulay essentialised the British character as judicious and modest. In doing so, he also naturalised corruption as a consequence of colonial contact with the “natives.” Thus, to control corruption was to also regulate forms of interactions between the British and the Indians. The conversion towards national probity and modesty thus involved inculcating personal distance and official superiority, which was at the heart of the utilitarian turn within the Company in 1830s. The need for regulating corruption also gained urgency in the face of the mounting debts that arose out of the immediate context of the Burmese War of 1824. Between 1828 and 1829, the revenue of India amounted to £22,000,000 against an annual expenditure of £18,000,000 with an accumulating Indian debt, which by that year had shot up to £40,000,000.20 By the end of 1820s the first Governor General of colonial India, William Bentinck (r. 1828–1835), had introduced several administrative reforms that targeted the erstwhile improvisational “factory” administration of the Company. Called as “The Government of India Act, 1833,” the Act itself constituted uniting the three different Presidencies of Fort William (Bengal), Fort Saint George (Madras), and Bombay under a supreme government headed by the Governor General based in Bengal.21

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The reforms purportedly “opened” the Company services to Indians even as it provided greater autonomy to its district officers. Autonomous administration also assumed internalisation of principles of standardised public service, which strengthened and consolidated the cause of what Eddy Kent has called as “the virtuous empire.”22 Influenced by Utilitarian philosophers, such as Jeremy Bentham, Bentinck’s reforms strove to heighten what Eric Stokes termed as the “inspectability” of the power enjoyed by British officers.23 “Inspectability” to the eighteenth-century thinkers meant simplified, discrete, and accessible forms of power. Simplified power, however, is also concentrated power; as we shall see, this characterisation of power as exclusive and rational was inconsistent with the realities of British administration. With this background in mind, we now turn to our examples that help us identify some of the themes of this chapter.

The Corrupt or the Corruptible? Mordaunt Ricketts was appointed as the Resident of Awadh in 1827 when the Company had already established a stable footing in the troubled region. Ricketts’s “corruption” case was, in many ways, reminiscent of Hastings’s. However, the Company’s treatment of it was equally different. While Hastings was unsuccessfully impeached in the parliament, censured and then glorified in the writings of Macaulay and Curzon, Ricketts died ignominiously. For a man of modest means—Ricketts’s family came from Pembroke—Ricketts had been appointed at two most significant situations: Murshidabad and then Lucknow. His first brush with trouble was when he decided to take a decisive position in what he called as a “trivial family affair” regarding one of the daughters of the King of Awadh, Taqi Jahan Begum also known as Mamula Begum. Mamula Begum, married into Faizabad nobility, had complained of being oppressed by her husband Mirza Hyder Taqi.24 Ricketts, along with the chaprasees and amlahs of his office, went to Faizabad and brought the Begum back to Lucknow without the consent of her husband. The matter reached an exacerbating point when, exhorted by the King of Awadh, Ricketts ordered for the confinement of Taqis, the husband and his older brother, in Lucknow. In response, Taqi’s mother—Lutfan Nissa Begum—sent an appeal directly to Bentinck’s office, who sent it for further review to London. The court censured Ricketts strongly for his alleged involvement in what they called a “private family matter.” Calling Ricketts’s actions as

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“injudicious and improper,” the board had obvious designs in fanning the conflict between King of Awadh and Mirza Taqi’s family. The board’s chastisement of Ricketts was premised on the calculation that a dispute between two powerful lineages—that of the King of Awadh and the Taqi family (the family-in-law of Mamula) who were the “objects of special care and favour” and “enjoy[ed] very large pensions under the guarantee and protection of the British government”25 —would yield a greater foothold for the British in the kingdom. Describing Mamula as “a lady of notoriously loose character,” the board stated that the resident’s conduct was especially outrageous since these noblemen should have been subjected to a “careful but private and delicate enquiry.”26 The board’s anger was not directed at Ricketts per se, but at his supposed overstepping of role in two fundamental ways. First, in declaring himself “supine” to the King of Awadh’s directives, Ricketts had abandoned the straight forward relationship of master-coloniser, and his authority to remain impartial. Second, in going with his office—the chaprasees and the clerks—to Mamula’s matrimonial home, Ricketts compromised the essential condition of public office of maintaining impersonal relations. Official distance was crucial in managing colonial superiority. Professional distances promoted exercise of moral authority over local communities in ways that allowed officers to strategise political interference. The logic of non-interference could alternate based on the convenience of expansionist aims. Nevertheless, the formal emphasis on professional distance went a long way in establishing claims of a dispassionate paternal authority, which came to a dramatic rupture in instances such as Ricketts’s. In establishing Ricketts’s culpability before his dismissal, the board referred to the circumstances that established the suspicions of corruption against him. The most important occurrence that the board found “inexplicable” and thus, a definite indication of “extensive corruption,” was the resignation of his entire establishment of indigenous clerks—including those not on Company salary. The board found it equally puzzling that these officers not only resigned but accompanied Ricketts to Calcutta on his onward journey to London. Another ground for suspicion for the board was Rickett’s securing of a considerable pension for Ghulam Hussein, his chief munshi. The board also observed that apart from establishing “an extensive system of corruption,” Ricketts was also guilty of displaying conflicted loyalties in continuing with Ghulam Hussein (against another European officer) who had been “secretly” employed

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by Itimad-ud-daulah, the ex-finance minister of the Awadh government and bête-noir of the Company establishment in Lucknow.27 The fear of divided loyalties was definitely exacerbated in the case of “independent” kingdoms, such as Awadh and Hyderabad. It is also apposite to remark here that the issue of conflicting loyalties was less a matter of territorial threat and more about maintaining what was inherently and deliberately a politically ambiguous relationship. Frequently commanding a large personnel of formal and informal groups of people engaged in royal espionage and intrigue—as in the case of the Raja of Sattara and Baroda Gaekwad28 —residency offices were often insidious, populated with a trail of local and informal networks of information. Further, the decades of 1820s and 1830s were ostensibly also a period of non-intervention towards the independent kingdoms, such as Awadh. In exercising military non-intervention, British residents became more critical in controlling the internal administration of the treaty states as the example of Awadh confirms.29 Highlighting the role of residents in treaty states, Sir Thomas Munro, in his 1832 letter to T. H Villiers, observed that the “mode and extent of our interference must….rest very much on the judgment and discretion of the British resident and government.” Leaving the states on their own would risk the existence of the Company for “[these states] would immediately endeavour to organize and maintain an efficient military force, ready to take every opportunity to act against us.”30 The ambiguous position of the resident was politically critical as well as convenient. This is why residents could also severely sabotage the careful hoax of paternal autonomy granted by British non-interference. Ricketts’s bonhomie with his functionaries was a direct challenge to the already well-established perceptions of the Awadh sovereign and his ministers as “profligate” and “mischievous,” as well as confounding attempts to present the British as prudent and judicious.31 It remains unclear whether the indigenous officials involved at the Lucknow Residency resigned to show loyalty and solidarity with Ricketts or to cover their own complicities. What is clear is that the issue of Rickett’s collaboration with indigenous officers remained the most irksome one for the Company. The fact that Ricketts formulated his own relationship with indigenous officials jeopardised the imperatives of bureaucratic transparency. Bureaucratic transparency demanded formal relationships between officials and forms of personal collaborations were to be vigilantly avoided. Corruption was—in this case—not just a matter of monetary

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dysfunction, but something that confirmed the Company’s fears of extraofficial collaboration. Even as the professional distance was integral to the Company’s image of itself, the reality of colonial offices was slightly different. Covenanted servants often functioned in tandem with local and European officials and typically relied on the munshis and amlahs, in addition to a host of uncovenanted servants for information. Indeed, holding the title of “monthly writers,” the European uncovenanted servants— largely Portuguese in origin, rose up to superior positions such as Deputy Collectors, Deputy Civil Auditor, the Assistant to Secretary in the Salt and Opium Department and Assistants to Salt Agents. Unlike what seems logical, the Portuguese and the Indians were also the favourites in the Secret Department.32 The problem of regulating extra-official relationships within the Company administration came to fore in the case of Middleton as well. Although Middleton’s biography remains obscure, he seems to have joined the Company in 1811 as a junior magistrate in Bengal Province. Like Ricketts, he subsequently rose in rank to head the Provincial Court of Calcutta. Not much is known about Middleton’s career until 1834 when there was a host of appeals filed against Middleton’s judgement on the last day of the functioning of the Provincial Court. After about a year of investigation and correspondence between the Company and the board, Middleton, who was then heading the Diwani Adalat in Dhaka, was dismissed from office. The central charge laid on Middleton was irregularity in public conduct especially with regard to the last eleven cases he judged on 31 December, 1833. The investigation committee appointed concluded that these irregularities were a result of Middleton working under the “uncomprehensible influence” of his Indian aide, Harchunder Lahoree. The court observed that “by his unaccountable supineess, he has prevented the iniquity of his amlah from being fully exposed and punished.” He was also accused of “culpable neglect of duty” in not keeping a check on his indigenous officers and, in fact, having shielded his aides from investigation.33 Like Ricketts, there were no formal charges established against Middleton. He returned to Britain and, like Ricketts, published a “sensational” expose of Company affairs, presenting himself as the whistleblower. However, unlike Ricketts’s case, his aide was investigated along with three others who formed a part of his office. Lahoree was subsequently sentenced to thirteen years of imprisonment.34 The team was unable to find any conclusive answers as to why Middleton seems to have

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signed several decisions without there appearing to be any definitive proof of forgery by his amlah. Reporting the general state of confusion that Middleton’s contradictory decisions had warranted, Barwell—the then commissioner of Alipore—demanded immediate clarification. With an uncharacteristic self-pity, the commissioner complained of the rumours that were “rife in the district that some amlah in the Provincial Court, taking advantage of the confusion attendant on the abolishment of a court, has been playing tricks.”35 What is interesting to note here is not just the improper eclipsing of a subordinate over his commanding officer, but the serious treatment of rumour in Barwell’s diagnosis. Not incidentally then, in its enquiry and analysis of Middleton’s case, the Company employed the language of serendipity and surprise. The enquiry remarked on how these several instances of judicial misconduct were obscure until Mill, another commissioner involved in the case, “discovered” the discrepancies in rent payment. Words such as “chance upon,” “discover,” “reveal” and then their antonyms such as “hidden,” “inscrutable,’” “unaccountable” appeared several times in the Company’s indictment of Middleton. The use of the language of discovery to describe this deviance is indicative of two strategic attitudes. Firstly, surprise denotes a rupture in otherwise “normal” Company management. Secondly, the use of such vocabulary signifies the desire to render transparent what is ambiguous or unclear. If Ricketts and Middleton were examples of professional ambiguity, Colebrooke—their more famous contemporary—was not exactly a case of racial moral clarity either. Colebrooke’s example highlights the impossibility of making easy generalisations about the anthropological architecture of the colonial office in South Asia. James Edward Colebrooke came from an illustrious family of East India merchants and administrators. He was appointed to a very prominent position of Residency of Delhi in 1826. After a long and well-established career of 40 years, Colebrooke was eventually dismissed from service in 1831, on “twelve charges of corruption and embezzlement of public property by himself, his family, and his dewan, with his connivance.” Further, Colebrooke was also accused of “accepting nazars (gifts) in money, and other presents of value.” Accusations against him first surfaced from Trevelyan, his assistant and the whistle-blower in the case. Trevelyan’s discomfort from Colebrooke’s alleged corruption occurred after he “sighted natives entering the private chambers” of his residence. Further, Colebrooke’s dependence on Ram Gopal, his indigenous

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assistant, was scrutinized intensely. Thus, his securing a pension for his assistant Ram Gopal was presented as the “influence” of the Indian clerk on Colebrooke and his wife.36 Although there was a two-person enquiry set up to examine the case, what is indeed surprising in Colebrooke’s instance is the sheer reliance of the Company directors on Trevelyan’s accusation, investigation, and summary of the supposed felony. In fact, one of the early prosecutors, William Fraser, who refused to hold Colebrooke as accountable for accepting disproportionate nazars , was not just dismissed but denied from entering the Company services ever again.37 Even as the enquiry proceeded, Colebrooke’s writers and diwans were banned from entering the residency and eventually replaced by those of Metcalfe and Trevelyan.38 What is clear from this preliminary sketch is how Colebrooke’s enquiry was already predetermined towards a specific conclusion because of the way Trevelyan’s account remained unchallenged in the Company records. Colebrooke not only defended his own indigenous clerks, but also provided for a clear and unequivocal reasons for why the Company was eager to accuse him of corruption. Defending himself, he opined; The object now of our modern reformers is to put an end to all friendly intercourse—to all interchange of mutual courtesy, between us and our subjects! They, perhaps, contemplate some important political benefit from the estrangement which they are resolved to effect; but I congratulate myself on the prospect of leaving this country before the blessed effects of alienation can shew themselves…39

In his work Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, Joseph Sramek has argued that the piecemeal attitude of many early Company efforts towards official misconduct was increasingly translated into concern about the personal behaviour of the officers. For Sramek, this obsession with disciplining British officers had a direct connection with the British efforts “to govern India alone, without Indians.”40 A tendency to guide and determine the personal lives of the British was concomitant with the crucial recognition of the expanding territorial interests in the region. The cases of Colebrooke, Middleton, and Ricketts display this turn towards—what I call as—an ‘anthropological morality’—i.e., a specifically nineteenth-century project of unmoooring moral ideals from their religious provenance tethering them to an ascendant scientific

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governmentality. In situating the forms of moral conditioning involved in these particular instances of misrecognition, I find it useful to turn towards Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality.41 Regulating the personal conduct of Ricketts and his peers, the aim of the British was not just to encourage an external conformity to public probity. Re-describing relationships—of honour and loyalty, inter-racial alliances and intimacies as decadent and leading to corruption—was also about defining the moral economy of public and private. The need for this clarification corresponded with the dual need for establishing a structure of persuasion and consent that went along with coercive sovereignty. Such a dual mentality is evident from John Malcolm’s statements in his Instructions to Officers Serving Under Sir John Malcom. Written in 1821, the document itself is a remarkable manifesto about establishing, quite selectively, a double government—a government of extractive colonial power as well as a government of persuasive and discretionary powers. The role of people like Ricketts and Colebrooke was, thus, not just in ensuring the proper maintenance of existing colonies but such that involved moral exemplarity. Thus, Malcolm observes: “The forms of the official intercourse between European agents and Natives…[is such] that we may not sink the rank of the European superior in the estimation of those subject to his control.”42 Paradoxically, and in keeping with my thesis, this exemplarity of conduct had to be premised on impersonal exercise of power. According to Malcolm, the reasons for the prevalence of “gross misconduct” amongst Indians was because they were “a people who look in all questions of government more to persons than systems.”43 It was hard, Malcolm admitted, for Indian officers “from their prime ministers down to their lowest agents…to comprehend and trust” that governance “desired and expected [them] to act independently.” The task for the British, therefore, was not just in promoting impersonality by regulating potential sources of disrepute (such as corruption), but also to impart “confidence [in them] which is essential to their becoming competent functionaries of rule.”44 This liberal agenda of non-interference towards the indigenous people, promoted by people such as Malcolm, was also a strategy for regimenting and fashioning British moral subjectivities. The use of office to obscure or complicate vital public communication, display favouritism, and shield indigenous officers from punishments was a common offence mostly ignored by the Company. However, by 1830s, one could detect a strong tendency in selectively re-describing these

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offences as criminal. The official altercation between David Munro (a clerk in Delhi) and Thomas Metcalfe (the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi) in 1835, was a clear example of how—while the rules of regulating professional conduct was applied to lowly Munro—Metcalfe, the brother of the “burra saheb of these services,” Charles Metcalfe, was “reprimanded” only lightly.45 We will never perhaps know for sure the reasons behind Ricketts’s, Middleton’s, and Coleboroke’s alliances with their junior Indian officers and the role of these “natives” in the specific instances discussed above, but both the Indians and their respective officers were punished for something more than financial or professional misconduct. In aligning themselves with their assistants, these British officers broke away from the racial logic of imperial morality that valorised collective action. To recall Child’s words, the value of the collective Company lay in it being acceptable and legitimate, while individuals were “mere interlopers.”46 For the Company, the danger in Middleton’s, Ricketts’s, and Colebrooke’s behaviour was in their personal identifications with their office, which presumably contradicted imperial notions of “objective” and “rational” administration, a danger eighteenth and nineteenth century politics was all too familiar with.

Conclusion This chapter shows the convoluted historical career of terms such as “corruption.” What is corrupt and what is legitimate are questions entangled in the history of imperial interests. Similarly, prudence and propriety are also products of historical agendas. The three British officers were accused of corruption because they eluded the tacit norms of official conduct that the British had begun to carefully inculcate by the beginning of the nineteenth century. In doing so, they exposed the fragile networks of administrative interdependence and professional associations that confounded the tidy hierarchies of racial and moral superiority. By focusing on two of the key regional autonomous states—Delhi and Lucknow—this chapter also anticipates the prejudices (corruption and/or misadministration) that went on to justify British annexations of several princely states between the 1840s and 1850s, leading to the rebellion of 1857. Recalling this book editors’ useful injunction to think away from national and nationalistic narratives of corruption,47 this chapter also brings to fore the contribution of imperial corruption narratives in

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constructing competing regional and communal tropes of public morality and corruption. For example, the board’s condemnation of Lucknow as given to “habitual falsehood and more disregard…for veracity…from the lowest to the highest than in any other place perhaps in India,”48 has overtime translated into how certain regions and communities are considered more corrupt in contemporary India.49 Designating some communities as more corrupt than others challenges the uniform and consistent international narratives of corruption and exposes the variations in the regional and historical understanding of the term. However, more significantly, it is through these examples that one finally comes to have a more holistic understanding of how empires operate. Far from being passive receivers of unidirectional colonial policies, those scores of indigenous officers exemplify the multiple vectors of agency that functioned within the British empire.

Notes All references from the India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library are referenced with the abbreviation IOR/. 1. Bengal government take grave exception to instances of illegal and irregular exercise of authority on the part of Charles John Middleton, 15 April 1834, IOR/F/4/1537/61016 (December 1833–May 1835), Vol. 1, Judicial Proceedings, Bengal. 2. Ibid. 3. Our Governor General in Council, 17 June No. 10 of 1834, 31 Mar. 1831, E/4/741, Bengal, Political Department, no page. 4. Suspension from office of Sir James Edward Colebrooke, Resident and Commissioner of Delhi on account of various corrupt practices, 24 July 1829, IOR/F/4/1200/30914 A, Vol. 1, Resolution: Political Department, Bengal, 5. 5. Ibid., 9. 6. Ibid., 6. 7. See Xavier Huetz De Lemps’, Jonathan Saha’s and Pol Dalmau’s chapters in the present volume. 8. Sir Josiah Child, “A treatise Wherein Is Demonstrated, I. That the EastIndia Trade Is the Most National of All Foreign Trades, II. That the Clamours, Aspersions, and Objections Made Against the Present EastIndia Company, Are Sinister, Selfish, or Groundless,” Early English Books, accessed June 4, 2018, https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A32839. 0001.001. 2004–2005 [1681] (https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A32839. 0001.001). Access date: June 4 2018. Online.

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9. K N Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company 1600–1640 (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1999), 3–55 and 111–139. Philip Stern, The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 41–61. 10. To be sure, there is now a rich body of scholarship on colonial censorship and transformation of ‘vices’ such as prostitution and pornography. For an indicative list, see Ruth Austin Miller, The Erotics of Corruption: Law, Scandal, and Political Perversion (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 2008); Deana Heath, Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980); Stephen Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Erica Wald, Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780–1868, Cambridge Imperial and Post Colonial Studies Series (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India, Opus 1 Series (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); Sumanta Banerjee, Under the Raj: Prostitution in Colonial Bengal (NYU Press, 1998). Two recent works have also highlighted the contestations around the colonial disciplining of sexuality. See, Durba Mitra,Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020); Jessica Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2019). 11. Nicholas Dirks, The Scandal of Empire. (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press/.: Bellknap Press, 2006). 12. See R. Kroeze’s article in the present volume. 13. Ibid. 14. Jonathan Saha, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State: Corruption in Burma c.1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3. 15. Jonathan Saha, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State: Corruption in Burma c.1900 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 5. 16. Ruth Austin Miller, The Erotics of Corruption: Law, Scandal, and Political Perversion (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 2008), X. 17. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Speeches of Lord Macaulay Corrected by Himself (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860), 144–145. 18. Ibid.

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19. For British public perceptions on nabobs, see Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For an insightful study of different eighteenth and nineteenth-century caricatures of nabobs in British public discourse, see Christina Smylitopoulos, “Portrait of a Nabob: Graphic Satire, Portraiture, and the Anglo-Indian in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Canadian Art Review 37, no. 1 (2012): 16. 20. Hansard, Third Series, xviii, 724–725, June 13, 1833. For more on Bentinck’s appointment, the Company finances and its impact on administrative reforms see, B. B. Misra, The Central Administration of the East India Company (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 55–63. 21. Papers regarding the new constitution of the Government of India under the Charter Act of 1833, January 1831, IOR/F/4/1551/62250 (December 1833–August 1834), Vol. I, Legislative Department. 22. Eddy Kent, Corporate Character: Representing Imperial Power in British India, 1786–1901 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 65. 23. Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 74. 24. Case of Mamula Begum, injudicious conduct of Mr. Ricketts, Resident at Lucknow, censured, 27 July 1826, Political Department, Two Volumes, IOR/F/969/27400 and IOR/F/969/27400A (April 1825–July 1826 and September 1801–July 1826). 25. Extract Political Letter from Bengal, 27 July 1826, Case of Mamula Begum, IOR/F/4/969/27399 (Apr 1825–Jul 1826), Vol. I, Political Department, 2. 26. Ibid., 4–6. 27. Constitution of the Indian Government. IOR/F/4/1551. January, 1831. 28. The role of Resident Colonel Charles Ovans in the annexation of Sattara in 1838 is one of the many sordid examples of political intrigue that has hardly been undertaken by any serious scholarship. See Terence R. Blackburn, Justice for the Raja of Sattara? (New Delhi: APH Publishing Corporation, 2007). For the role of James Williams, Resident of Baroda, in the removal of Dhakjee Dadajee, the chief diwan and British commercial agent of Baroda, see IOR/F/4/1850/78202 (July 1840–September 1840) and IOR/F/4/1851/78203 (November 1837–March 1838). For a general overview on the residency system and its political impact, see Michael Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and Residency System, 1764–1858 (Oxford and Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1991). 29. Adrian Sever, “The States in Decline,” in Documents and Speeches on the Princely States, ed. Adrian Sever (Delhi: B.R. Publications, 1985), 1: 12– 13.

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30. John Munro, “Letter-Colonel Munro to T. H. Villiers, 1832,” in Documents and Speeches, ed. Adrian Sever (Delhi: B.R. Publications, 1985), 1: 172. 31. Henry Princep, “Henry Princep’s Political Review of the State of India, 1825,” in Documents and Speeches, ed. Adrain Sever (Delhi: B.R. Publications, 1985), 1: 152. 32. There are many examples of British ambiguity towards official interference with the indigenous states of India. The policies of proximity and distance was regulated through the office of British residency in the indigenous states. For residency politics on Awadh (Oudh) specifically, see: Fisher, Indirect Rule. 33. Extract: Judicial Letter from Bengal, 23 May 1835, Irregular proceedings of Charles John Middleton as judge of the late Provincial Court of Appeal for the Calcutta division IOR/F/4/1537/61016 (December 1833–May 1835), Judicial Department, Bengal, Vol. I, No. 4: 1835, 14–15. 34. Ibid., 16. 35. Letter from Government to C. J. Middleton, 3 April 1831, 257. 36. “Supplement to Asiatic Intelligence,” The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India, China and Australasia IX, New Series (September–December 1832): 41. 37. Ibid. 38. Papers regarding the suspension from office of Sir James Edward Colebrooke, 14 August 1829, IOR/F/4/1203/30914 E (c1827–1829), Vol. 5, Political Department. 39. Edward Colebrooke, “Letter from Edward Colebrooke to Messrs. Walter Ewer and Charles Macsween, Commissioners,” in Papers, Relative to the Case at Issue Between Sir Edward Colebrooke, BT and the Bengal Government (London: Jaques and Leach, 1833), IOR/T/1462, 10. 40. Joseph Sramek, Gender, Morality, Race in Company India, 1765–1858 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 38–39. 41. Michel Foucault and Colin Gordon, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 , 1st American ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 87. 42. John Malcolm, “Instructions to Officers Serving Under Sir John Malcolm,” in Documents and Speeches, ed. Adrian Sever (Delhi: B.R. Publications, 1985), 1: 136. 43. Ibid., 139. 44. John Malcolm, Documents and Speeches, 138. 45. Agra Narrative from January to March 1837, 24 June 1837 in Dismissal of David Munro, IOR/F/4/1667/66709 ([Jun 1835]–Apr 1837), 30, Political Department, India. 46. Child, “A treatise.”

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47. Ronald Kroeze, Pol Dalmau and Frédéric Monier, “Introduction,” in present volume. 48. Our Governor General in Council, 17 June No. 10 of 1834 E/4/741, Political Department, Bengal, 92. 49. Ashish Nandy triggered a political storm of sorts bsy remarking that lower caste communities in India are more corrupt than their upper-caste counterparts. See, “Most of the Corrupt Come from SC/STs, OBCs: Ashish Nandy,” Outlook India, January 26, 2013, https://www.outlookindia.com/newswire/story/most-of-the-cor rupt-from-scsts-obcs-ashis-nandy/788010.

Glossary Amlah: Private Servant Usually in Public Offices Chaprasee: Peon Diwani Adalat: Civil Court Munshi: Clerk Nazar: Gifts, usually on some auspicious occasion such as marriage, birth of an heir etc.

References Primary Sources India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library, London. Bengal Government take grave exception to instances of illegal and irregular exercise of authority on the part of Charles John Middleton, April 15 1834, IOR/F/4/1537/61016 (December 1833–May 1835), Vol. 1, Judicial Proceedings, Bengal. Our Governor General in Council, March 31, 1831, 17 June No. 10 of 1834, E/4/741, Bengal, Political Department, June 17, No. 10 of 1834 IOR/E/4/741. Political Department. Suspension from office of sir James Edward Colebrooke, Resident and Commissioner of Delhi on account of various corrupt practices, July 24, 1829, IOR/F/4/1200/30914 A, Vol. 1, Resolution: Political Department, Bengal. Common Sitting of Parliament, June 13, 1833, 18, cc 698–725. Hansard, Third Series, xviii: 724–725, Accessed June 18, 2019. https://api.parliament.uk/ historic-hansard/commons/1833/jun/13/east-india-companys-charter. Case of Mamula Begum, injudicious conduct of Mr. Ricketts, Resident at Lucknow, censured, 27 July 1826, Two Volumes, IOR/F/969/27400 and

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IOR/F/969/27400A (April 1825–July 1826 and September 1801–July 1826), Political Department. Extract Political Letter from Bengal, 27 July 1826, Case of Mamula Begum, IOR/F/4/969/27399 (April 1825–July 1826), Vol. I, Political Department. Papers regarding the new constitution of the Government of India under the Charter Act of 1833, January 1831, IOR/F/4/1551/62250 (December 1833–August 1834), Vol. I, Legislative Department. Extract: Judicial Letter from Bengal, 23 May 1835, Irregular proceedings of Charles John Middleton as judge of the late Provincial Court of Appeal for the Calcutta division IOR/F/4/1537/61016 (December 1833–May 1835), Judicial Department, Bengal, Vol. I, No. 4: 1835. “Supplement to Asiatic Intelligence.” The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India, China and Australasia IX New Series, 41. Papers regarding the suspension from office of Sir James Edward Colebrooke, August 14, 1829, IOR/F/4/1203/30914 E (c1827–1829), Vol. 5, Political Department. Colebrooke, Edward. “Letter from Edward Colebrooke to Messrs. Walter Ewer and Charles Macsween, Commissioners.” In Papers, Relative to the Case at Issue Between Sir Edward Colebrooke, BT and the Bengal Government (London: Jaques and Leach, 1833), IOR/T/1462, 10. Agra Narrative from January to March 1837, 24 June 1837 in Dismissal of David Munro, IOR/F/4/1667/66709 ([June 1835]–Apr 1837), pp. 30. Political Department, India. Our Governor General in Council, 17 June No. 10 of 1834 E/4/741, Political Department, Bengal.

Secondary Sources Ahmed, Siraj. “‘The Pure Soil of Universal Benevolence’: The Rule of Property and the Rise of an Imperial Ideology in the 1790s.” Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an Dá Chultúr 15 (2000): 139–157. Accessed June 18, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30071446. Bayly, C. A. Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870. 1st ed. Cambridge South Asian Studies 28. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Beaglehole, T. H. “From Rulers to Servants: The I.C.S. and the British Demission of Power in India.” Modern Asian Studies 11, no. 2 (1977): 237–255. Accessed June 12, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/311550. Bellenoit, Hayden. “Between Qanungos and Clerks: The Cultural and Service Worlds of Hindustan’s Pensmen, C. 1750–1850.” Modern Asian Studies 48, no. 4 (2014): 872–910. Accessed May 14, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/sta ble/24494608.

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Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Blackburn, Terence, ed. Justice for the Raja of Sattara? New Delhi: APH Publishing Corporation, 2007. Bowen, H. V. The Business of Empire: the East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Bown, Stephen R. Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600– 1900. New York, NY: Thomas Dunne Books, 2009. Buchan, Bruce and Lisa Hill. An Intellectual History of Political Corruption. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Button, Mark E. “The Call of Accountability.” In Political Vices, 125–156. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Chadhuri, K. N. The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint Stock Company 1600–1640. London: Routledge, 1999 [1965]. Chaturvedula, Nandini. “On the Precipice of Ruin: Consumption, Sumptuary Laws, and Decadence in Early Modern Portuguese India.” Journal of World History 26, no. 2 (2015): 355–384. Accessed June 15, 2019. https://www. jstor.org/stable/43901756. Child, Josiah. “A Treatise Wherein Is Demonstrated, I. That the East-India Trade Is the Most National of All Foreign Trades, II. That the Clamours, Aspersions, and Objections Made Against the Present East-India Company, Are Sinister, Selfish, or Groundless.” Early English Books. Accessed June 4, 2018. https:// name.umdl.umich.edu/A32839.0001.001. Das, S. K. Public Office, Private Interest: Bureaucracy and Corruption in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002. Dirks, Nicholas B. The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. Douglas, Howland. Personal Liberty and Public Good: The Introduction of John Stuart Mill to Japan and China. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Edwardes, Michael. Glorious Sahibs: The Romantic as Empire-Builder 1799–1838. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1968. Erikson, Emily. “Decentralization, Corruption, and Market Structure.” In Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600– 1757 , 107–124. Princeton Analytical Sociology Series. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Fisher, Michael. The Indirect Rule in India: Residents and Residency System, 1764–1858. Oxford and Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1991. Geuss, Raymond. Public Goods, Private Goods. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Godkin, E. L. “The Civil Service Reform Controversy.” The North American Review 134, no. 305 (1882): 379–394. Accessed May 12, 2019. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/25101045.

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Gould, William. Introduction to Bureaucracy, Community, and Influence in India: Society and the State, 1930s–1960s, 1–21. Routledge Studies in South Asian History 11. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2010. Gould, William, Taylor C. Sherman and Sarah Ansari. “The Flux of the Matter: Loyalty, Corruption and the Everyday State in the Post-Partition Government Services of India and Pakistan,” Past & Present 219, no. 1 (May 2013): 237–279. Accessed April 2, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gts045. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Harling, Philip. The Waning of “Old Corruption”: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846. Oxford: Clarendon Press and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Hejeebu, Santhi. “Contract Enforcement in the English East India Company.” The Journal of Economic History 65, no. 2 (2005): 496–523. Accessed April 24, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3875070. Hull, Matthew S. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Hutchins, Francis G. The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967. Kaur, Ravinder. “India Inc. and Its Moral Discontents.” Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 20 (2012): 40–45. Accessed April 19, 2019. https://www. jstor.org/stable/23214625. Keay, John. The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company. 1st American ed. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co and Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1994. Kent, Eddy. Corporate Character: Representing Imperial Power in British India, 1786–1901. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Knights, Mark. “Anticorruption in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain.” In Anticorruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era, edited by Kroeze, Ronald, André Vitória and Guy Geltner, 181–196. 1st ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Lawson, Philip. The East India Company: A History. New York: Addison Wesley Longman Inc: 1987. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. Speeches of Lord Macaulay Corrected by Himself. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860. Malcolm, John. “Instructions to Officers Serving Under Sir John Malcolm.” In Documents and Speeches, edited by Adrian Sever. 2 vols. Delhi: B.R. Publications, 1985. Marshall, P. J. Problems of Empire: Britain and India. London: Geroge Allen and Unwin, 1968.

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Mishra, Rupali Raj. A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company. Harvard Historical Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Misra, B. B. The Central Administration of the East India Company: 1774–1835. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959. Miller, Ruth A. Introduction to The Erotics of Corruption: Law, Scandal, and Political Perversion, vii–xxv. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Mills, Lennox A. “Methods of Appointment and Training in the British and Dutch Colonial Civil Services.” The American Political Science Review 33, no. 3 (1939): 465–472. Accessed 12 May, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 1948800. Mui, Hoh-cheung and Lorna H. Mui. The Management of Monopoly: A Study of the English East India Company’s Conduct of Its Tea Trade, 1784–1833. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984. Munro, John. “Letter-Colonel Munro to T. H. Villiers, 1832.” In Documents and Speeches, edited by Adrian Sever. 2 vols. Delhi: B.R. Publications, 1985. Nechtman, Tillman W. Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Nightingale, Pamela. Fortune and Integrity: A Study of Moral Attitudes in the Indian Diary of George Paterson, 1769–1774. Oxford University South Asian Studies Series. Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Outlook India. “Most of the Corrupt Come from SC/STs, OBCs: Ashish Nandy.” Outlook India, January 26, 2013. https://www.outlookindia.com/ newswire/story/most-of-the-corrupt-from-scsts-obcs-ashis-nandy/788010. Osborne, Thomas. “Bureaucracy as a Vocation: Governmentality and Administration in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Journal of Historical Sociology 7, no. 3 (1994): 289–313. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6443.1994.tb00067.x. Pavrala, Vinod. “Cultures of Corruption and the Corruption of Culture: The East India Company and the Hastings Impeachment.” In Corrupt Histories, edited by Emmanuel Kreike and William C. Jordan, 291–336. Rochester, NY: University Rochester Press, 2004. Philip, Mark. “Officials and Public Servants.” In Political Conduct, 141–168. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pitts, Jennifer. A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Poullaos, Chris and Suki Sian, eds. Accountancy and Empire: The British Legacy of Professional Organization. Routledge New Works in Accounting History 10. New York, NY: Routledge, 2010. Princep, Henry. “Henry Princep’s Political Review of the State of India, 1825.” In Documents and Speeches, edited by Adrian Sever, 1: 152. Delhi: B.R. Publications, 1985

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Raman, Bhavani. Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial India. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012. Roy, Tirthankar. The East India Company: The World’s Most Powerful Corporation, The Story of Indian Business. New Delhi: Allen Lane, 2012. Saha, Jonathan. Law, Disorder and the Colonial State: Corruption in Burma c.1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Sen, Sudipta. Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and Making of the Colonial Marketplace. Critical Histories. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Sen, Sudipta. Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. Sever, Adrian, ed. Documents and Speeches on the Princely States. Vol. 1, Delhi: B.R. Publications, 1985. Shanthakumari Sunder, L. Values and Influence of Religion in Public Administration. New Delhi and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011. Sharma, Malti. Indianization of the Civil Services in British India, 1858–1935. New Delhi: Manak Publications, 2001. Sramek, Joseph. Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Stern, Philip J. “‘The Most Sure and Profitable Sort of Merchandice’: Protestantism and Piety” and “‘The Day of Small Things’: Civic Governance in the New Century.” In The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, 100–120, 164–184. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Stokes, Eric. The English Utilitarians and India. Oxford, Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Sutherland, Lucy Stuart. The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. Travers, Robert. Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British Bengal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Tripathi, Amales. Trade and Finance in the Bengal Presidency, 1793–1833. New and rev. Ed. Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1979. Watson, Ian Bruce. Foundation for Empire: English Private Trade in India, 1659– 1760. New Delhi: Vikas, 1980. Webster, Tony. “An Early Global Business in a Colonial Context: The Strategies, Management, and Failure of John Palmer and Company of Calcutta, 1780— 1830.” Enterprise & Society 6, no. 1 (2005): 98–133. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/23700219. Wilson, Jon. The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

CHAPTER 5

Corrupt and Rapacious: Colonial Spanish-American Past Through the Eyes of Early Nineteenth-Century Contemporaries. A Contribution from the History of Emotions Moisés Prieto

Introduction A spirit of corruption has infected all the colonies of Spain in America. Men far removed from the seat of government; impatient to acquire wealth, that they may return speedily from what they are apt to consider as a state of exile in a remote unhealthful country; allured by opportunities too tempting to be resisted, and seduced by the example of those around them; find their sentiments of honour and of duty gradually relax. In private life they give themselves up to a dissolute luxury, while in their public conduct they become unmindful of what they owe to their sovereign [King Philip II of Spain] and to their country.1

M. Prieto (B) University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 R. Kroeze et al. (eds.), Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era, Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9_5

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This quote from the opus by Reverend William Robertson (1721– 1793) on the history of Spanish America, first published in 1777, shows how corruption is considered to be a consequence—or at least a favourable circumstance—of the distance between the colonies and metropolitan Spain. It also points to the general challenges of colonial administration combined with the very own passions of men in power.2 Moreover, the above quote reflects two important aspects: a transatlantic if not even global focus conditioned by a political and historical awareness, very much in line with Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789); and a consciousness of sentiments by means of references to “honour” and “duty”,3 thus appealing the reader to a repertoire of sentiments he or she might be able to decode and understand. The awakening of emotions and their reflection in texts, mainly in Enlightenment France, was the starting point for a radical and inexorable development chiefly inspired by the writings of Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778).4 The same author and his writings have to be considered also a cardinal point for the awakening of corruption critique in the second half of the eighteenth century.5 This raises the question about the possibility of deconstructing corruption and anti-corruption discourses in their emotional components. The semantic extension of “corruption” was based on the development of a new ethos under the auspices of the Enlightenment.6 Also, the writings of Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu (1689–1755)— L’Esprit des lois —show the importance of virtue, honour and fear in the building of a society freed from corruption. Montesquieu rescued the ancient Roman ethos in the sense of a political virtue; that is, the placing of all energies in the service of their city, to renounce to one self’s expectation and for the sake of higher purposes.7 German historian Jens Ivo Engels distinguishes three meanings of “corruption”: physical, moral and political corruption.8 In fact, most of the sources used for this article contain references to the latter form, although “moral decay” (in French corruption des mœurs ) appears as another common meaning, actually paving the way to “the misuse of public office for private advantage or profit”.9 Without specifying the meaning of “corruption” for this particular case—which may include nepotism, clientelism, fraud, malversation, bribery and different forms of extortion—there is nowadays a general consensus on the pervasiveness of this phenomenon in colonial Spanish America, until the very

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end of colonial rule and beyond.10 The metaphor of congregated officeholders drinking chocolate, as mentioned in Pol Dalmau’s contribution for the case of late nineteenth-century colonial Cuba, perfectly synthesises this idea. Moreover, the consensus on the ubiquity of corruption in the Spanish colonial empire already started among late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century historians.11 However, different sources report a mitigation of this evil by means of reforms inspired by the ideas of the Age of Reason. For instance, both the above-mentioned Reverend Robertson and Prussian polymath and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) appreciated the improvements brought by José de Gálvez (1720–1787), first royal Visitor-General in charge of studying the colonial administrative structures in America, and then Minister of the Indies under King Charles III of Spain.12 The early nineteenth century is generally considered the epoch of America’s “second discovery”.13 Mainly inspired by Alexander von Humboldt, merchants, travellers, scientists like Charles Darwin (1809– 1882) or Alcide d’Orbigny (1802–1857) and adventurers like Louis Henri Ducoudray Holstein (1772–1839) travelled through Latin America with different purposes. They wrote down their experiences as travel reports which were avidly read in Europe. These documents were not only supposed to provide mere entertainment or knowledge about local customs, flora and fauna, but sometimes contained historical essays on the recent past of those former colonies. In fact, those young republics were now ruled by strongmen who, in some cases, were deeply inspired by the ideas of the European Enlightenment and consequently by an ethos of rectitude, which reached enlightened absolutism too in the shape of the dictum “the prince is the first state servant”.14 Nevertheless, nepotism, favouritism, misappropriation, bribery or arbitrariness were still present in those accounts which tried to explain these phenomena in different ways. This raises the questions on the narratives of corruption, how they were built, what moral lens and what patterns of explanation were used. What historical models were used as a comparison and what emotions are involved within the narrative on corruption? This chapter endeavours to discuss different views from travellers, historians and dissidents upon colonial Spanish America. The geographical focus will be on three regions: New Spain (now Mexico), Paraguay and Buenos Aires. The rising importance of the history of emotions, of which the history of corruption has paid little attention, is justified for providing an additional layer of plausibility, but also for being an

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increasing phenomenon in political discourses—as I already stated above. In doing so, new insights may be gained about those narratives which were often controversial and not always consistently resorted to. While the history of corruption has been a subject attended to by historians of economy and law, it seems that those untamed passions at the very origin of corruption should now probably be unveiled under the auspices of the history of emotions. Nevertheless, it is important to point out that the historical treatment of sentiments bears some perils too, since the interpretation of feelings can vary depending on the epoch, the social stratum and the cultural space.15 For the above purpose, the set of sources used will be composed of historical essays, treaties, reports and political pamphlets—all of them containing comments on corruption. If we believe that the Enlightenment provided the “healing powers” for the palliation of corruption, it is necessary to point out the frame of such an intellectual spread within the Atlantic space. Already in 1978, Italian law historian Pierangelo Catalano remarked on the case of the dictator of Paraguay, Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia—who held in his library authors such as Voltaire, Charles Rollin (Histoire romaine), Juan de Haller (Historia romana) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Contrat social )—that the dissemination of the ideas of Roman constitutional history was still an understudied topic.16 Back in 1999, John Lynch argued that “we still need a comprehensive study of Enlightenment ideas in Spanish America”.17 The works of historians José Carlos Chiaramonte and Carlos Stoetzer, as well as those by Noemí Goldman and Gabriel Entin, have contributed to address the question on the transfer of knowledge in Spanish America, and particularly in the River Plate region, paving the way for further research.18

´ Novohispanic Doleances An example for the perception of corruption might be provided by the great explorer with a global dimension and polymath himself. Alexander von Humboldt stated in his Essai politique sur le Royaume de la NouvelleEspagne, devoted to the description of the mining resources and the statistics of a region that would become today’s Mexico19 : “The first choice of the persons to whom the count [sic] confided the important places of intendant or governor of a province was extremely fortunate. Among the twelve who shared the administration of the country in 1804, there was not one whom the public accused of corruption or want of

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integrity”.20 While this argument stays in line with the fortunate policies of Gálvez, the Prussian savant had expressed his contempt for slavery and the discriminatory condition of the indigenous population.21 However, one could raise the question on Humboldt’s honesty in praising the purported lack of corruption. After all, he was sponsored by the Spanish monarch, which would suggest disregarding some grievances in favour of punctual panegyrics.22 In doing so, Humboldt defends the colonial administration and the Crown’s honour. This statement may be read twofold, since it can be a way to pay respect to King Charles IV and to his wise appointments, but also as an interlined statement. In other words, a claim on the general reputation of Spanish colonial administration; incorrupt officeholders appear here to be an exception and not as the rule. Considering Humboldt’s condemnation of slavery, we probably should presume that the praise of the lack of corruption is sarcasm. Thus, Humboldt’s thoughts show affinities with those from a contemporary Mexican patriot and priest; i.e. Fray Servando Teresa de Mier (1765–1827), who addressed the corrupt colonial administration in his writings.23 Also, German-speaking historiography was aware of corruption in the Spanish-American colonies, as the work by historian and translator Franz Kottenkamp (1806–1858) attests. The following quote by Kottenkamp, which might very much be an analogous transliteration of the above by Reverend Robertson, explains corruption as a consequence of a caste of awkward, ignorant and greedy bureaucrats, as he writes: The government itself suffered significant damage to its revenues as a result of this administration’s composition. In a pure bureaucracy, where strict control is impossible because of the distance from the centre, bribery is a necessary consequence. Moreover, all Spaniards had quick enrichment and return to the motherland in mind, motives to use the means all the more eagerly, which could carry them quickly.24

Such an unjust system could no longer be tolerable, especially in a region exposed to the dissemination of enlightened thinkers despite the vigilant eye of the Spanish Inquisition.25 Thus critique gained public space. The essay edited by Carlos María de Bustamante (1774–1848) entitled Mexico por dentro y fuera, bajo el gobierno de los Vireyes (Mexico from inside and outside under the viceroys ), written in 1787 by Hipólito Villarroel, but not published until 1831,26 provides a deep insight into the elites and the

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civil and ecclesiastical authorities of New Spain. Villarroel was a Spanishborn social reformer and mayor of Tlapa.27 In his 190-page text the Mexican patriot resorts to the metaphor of pathology, considering corruption—among other evils—a disease manifested by means of determined “symptoms”, for which particular remedies should be applied. Particularly harsh words are used to denote the judicial administration, starting from the judges themselves and extending throughout the hierarchy of judicial officers, advisors, scribes, etc.28 In such a system, the innocent is condemned while the criminal is set free; the perversion of justice to pursue private interests prevails. The salary increase for the members of the judicial caste, aimed at preventing bribery, did not fulfil their expectations. As a “therapy” against this evil, Villarroel suggested the suspension of the corrupt officers, which is considered a hard but necessary measure by the author: “Quod non sanat medicamentum, sanat ferrum: quod non sanat ignis, est insanabile”. However, Villarroel still expressed some hope regarding the correction of those evils if a visitor-general dissolves the chaos. In writhing this, he stated his loyalty and confidence in the authority of the Spanish crown, thus underlining the need for reforms rather than an irreversible revolution. Villarroel’s repertoire of grievances has to be located in a global perspective within the practice of the so-called cahiers de doléances, which were at the origin of the French Revolution’s emotional foundation. Although a format belonging to the ancien régime with its language of loyalty,29 the cahiers transported the claims for radical changes through the mobilisation of determined sentiments. These sentiments were the public wrath and indignation, amplified within the public space, no longer seen as an act of allegiance or a humble petition to the sovereign, but as a claim made on the basis of natural rights.30 Thus, “anger against tyranny and injustice”31 became the motors of an irreversible and unstoppable change. This does not mean that Spanish Americans were simply “influenced” by the events in France or the American Revolution,32 but rather that they drew on the same “enlightened” sources and narratives.33 Nevertheless, according to Jeremy Adelman, Enlightenment-inspired corruption rhetoric did not aim at revolution per se.34 It is, however, important to point out that unlike the French, the subjects of the Spanish king in Latin America were far away from their sovereign. The celebrations with the occasion of Charles III’s funeral, and the coronation of his son Charles IV in 1789, show the efforts

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to ingrain the love for the sovereign.35 Additionally, this illustrated the choreography of the feasts where the Spanish colonial elite and aristocracy’s ostentation, in the face of the Creoles, created a clear distinction between the powerful and the powerless.36 Also, Kottenkamp mentioned in his compendium on the history of Spanish America the iniquities of the judicial system, with a particular emphasis on the discrimination of Creoles by the Spanish elite officeholders and bureaucrats.37 A judge from Aragon made a different sentence than the one from Castile, who again deviated from the decision of another from Granada etc. Thus, the uncertainty of the law and of their own existence was added to the remaining inconvenience that the Creoles had to suffer from the motherland. The only antidote was the power of the Viceroy, who was able to nullify the verdict of the courts in the highest instance, thus adding the last unrestricted interpretation and application of the laws to his remaining power. The consequence of this may be easily imagined. Among the Creoles there was a general opinion that no trial against native Spaniards could be won by them without greater bribery.38

Thus, a sentiment of uncertainty and hopelessness becomes patent which, according to Kottenkamp, could only be palliated through the practice of bribery. In other words, within this narrative bribery would neutralise systemic corruption and iniquity of the colonial courts of justice. Royal authority exercised by the viceroys was, however, fading in those revolutionary years around 1810, which were characterised by the transition and transformation of public administration and meant, therefore, a challenge for foreign witnesses. A particularly peculiar transition was occurring in Paraguay, which belonged under Spanish colonial rule to the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. There—unlike most other parts of Hispanic America where generally military leaders seized power—a theologian was about to climb the ladder of supreme authority.

The Incorruptible Dictator? José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia was born in 1766 in Yaguarón.39 His father was a Brazilian officer and tobacco trader, his mother the niece of a former governor and captain-general. Francia attended primary school and undergraduate studies in philosophy and theology in Asunción. Between 1778 and 1788, he studied at the Universidad Real de Córdoba del Tucumán, where he eventually was granted the title of

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Doctor en Sagrada Teología. He then returned to Asunción, where he practised law and taught theology. The Congress of Paraguay approved a new constitution with two consuls as chiefs of state, bound by the principle of collegiality, for the duration of one year. Dr. Francia and Colonel Fulgencio Yegros were elected to this new office in 1813. One year later, when the Congress had to renew the Consulate, Francia proposed another reform: a sole dictator should lead the country in order to save it from the influence of Europeans and secure national independence. Hence, Francia was elected dictator for a five-year term (dictador temporal ).40 Notwithstanding the expiration of this term, in 1816 the Congress had already convened and voted to confer a lifetime dictatorship, and the right to convoke the Congress to Francia.41 During his entire dictatorship he did not convoke the Congress, which finally convened in 1840—the year of his death. The European public gained a stronger awareness of Francia through an essay written by Johann Rudolf Rengger (1795–1832), a Swiss doctor who travelled to Paraguay with his colleague Marcelin Longchamp (1794–1861) for research purposes. Their stay lasted from 1819 until 1825. Rengger and Longchamp wrote the Essai historique sur la révolution du Paraguay, et le gouvernement dictatorial du docteur Francia, along with German and English versions in 1827. In their essay, the two Swiss physicians sketched the history of the Paraguayan revolution with a strong focus on Francia’s struggle for power as well as his personality traits.42 Leila Gómez describes the Essai historique as a meticulous attempt to scrutinise not only the Paraguayan prisons, but also the Paraguayan culture.43 The arbitrariness and ruthlessness reported in the text betray a clear contempt for Francia’s policies, on the part of the authors. However, they also praised his virtues, such as incorruptibility and austerity, done by means of particular accounts within the essay. The first one deals with the origins of Francia’s reputation as a lawyer, with particular noble principles opposed to the colonial system. After returning to his own country from the university, Doctor Francia distinguished himself by a degree of courage and integrity which nothing could surmount. Never did he sully his function by undertaking an unjust cause: he readily defended the weak against the strong — the poor against the rich. He exacted large fees from those who could pay, and especially from those who were disposed to litigation; but he was extremely disinterested in dealing with those clients who were either in humble

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circumstances, or were reluctantly forced into the courts by the unjust conduct of others.44

This rough description was resumed in an account by the Robertson brothers. John Parish Robertson (1792–1843) and William Parish Robertson were two Scottish merchants who in 1812 and 1814, respectively, travelled to Paraguay with the purpose of establishing commercial relations.45 Francia expelled them in 1815, though they waited until the late 1830s to take their “revenge”. The authors chose an epistolary structure, where anecdotes and single reminiscences offered quite the opposite of a benevolent portrayal. The Robertsons’ letters contained many references to the previously cited essay of Rengger and Longchamp. Nevertheless, as historian Günter Kahle points out, the polemical portions in the Robertsons’ account are limited to those anecdotes and reports provided by third parties, while their personal experiences generally attested to the dictator’s kind manners and gentle behaviour.46 Despite their contempt for the ruler of Paraguay, they still paid tribute to his rectitude through the following anecdote, which was narrated on the basis of the biblical story of Naboth’s vineyard. Dr. Francia’s advocacy was requested by a friend who wanted to possess a vineyard which belonged to a certain Estanislao Machain,47 who was a known enemy of Francia. The dictator declined to help his friend in a trial he considered an “unrighteous cause”. Since his friend insisted, Francia decided to offer his legal services to Machain instead. “The first ‘escrito’, or writing, sent in by Francia to the Juez de Alzada, or Judge of the Court of Appeal, confounded the adverse advocates, and staggered the judge, who was in their interest. ‘My friend,’ said the judge to the leading counsel, ‘I cannot go forward in this matter, unless you bribe Dr. Francia to be silent.’ ‘I will try,’ replied the advocate, and he went to Naboth’s counsel with a hundred doubloons (about three hundred and fifty guineas,) which he offered him as a bribe to let the cause take its iniquitous course. Considering, too, that his best introduction would be a hint that this douceur was offered with the judge’s concurrence, the knavish lawyer hinted to the upright one that such was the fact.” However, Francia replied vigorously: “Out with your vile insinuations, and dross of gold from my house”. Then, Francia went to the residence of the judge. “‘Sir’ continued Francia, ‘you are a disgrace to law, and a blot upon justice. You are, moreover, completely in my power; and unless to-morrow I have a decision in favour of my client, I will make your seat upon the bench

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too hot for you, and the insignia of your judicial office shall become the emblems of your shame’”.

The judge pronounced himself in favour of Francia’s client, who kept his vineyard. The judge’s reputation vanished, while the courageous advocate’s fame was consolidated. There are no indications about the sources of this account in the Robertsons’ text. Since this episode was set before the emancipation from Spanish colonial rule, the authors could not have witnessed it. However, the anecdote became popular. Even Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) reported it in his essay from 1843 entitled Dr Francia, where the Scottish author praised the virtues of the dictator.48 In the anecdote, corruption within the Spanish colonial judiciary system is shown in two ways. Firstly, it suggests the partiality of the judge who is in favour to support the unjust interests of the plaintiff. Secondly, the judge himself recommends the plaintiff to bribe the defendant’s advocate, so that he shall betray his client and lose the cause. The account as such takes us back to the primordial meaning of corruption as a crime mainly perpetrated by a judge.49 Finally, the use of Naboth’s biblical account as a narrative device might reveal a particular pattern of interpretation for corruption, too. This use of justice, called empapelamiento, was a common practice to pursue material interests or to attack an enemy by means of judicial acts.50 This was also a typically gender-related practice, frequently resorted to by women in despair in order to obtain a fair extrajudicial agreement, or in order to repair offences of honour and reputation.51 In fact, towards the end of the eighteenth century, Spanish America witnessed an increased use of legal practices; a phenomenon Bianca Premo summarises as it follows: Thus, beyond the legal arguments they marshaled to their cases, litigants practiced the Enlightenment in the very act of going to civil court. By repeatedly hauling ‘tyrannical’ domestic and community authority figures before royal judges, litigants made space for law as a system of rights and rules that transcended the hierarchical order of colonial society.52

Honour was a paramount aspect in this development.53 It mattered not if honour was not considered a proper emotion in the strict sense; early modern societies saw different conceptions of honour depending on social class, estate, gender and profession.54 The conceptual change of honour distinguishes the ancien régime notion of honour, based on blood nobility

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as opposed to the newer nobility of virtue.55 France witnessed a comeback of honour from the beginning of Napoleonic rule, but that was no longer attached to or exclusive of aristocracy.56 Sometimes the dictator’s eulogy may be seen as implicitly opposed to the former situation during the ancien régime. The Robertsons sketch a situation of utmost colonial exploitation in spite of a legal frame disposed for its prevention. The laws of the Indies, though framed in many respects with a humane tendency, and liberal policy, were seldom carried into effect, and almost never for the benefit of the community. Spain in her poverty was a continual drain upon the colonies; and all the revenue that could be raised from them on the plan of a jealous and restricted commercial policy, was ever urgently called for by the mother country. So much only was kept back as was necessary to defray the expenses of the local government, and satisfy the demands of a corrupt and rapacious colonial administration. In proportion as the exigencies of Spain increased, a still greater relaxation in the government of the colonies took place. More supplies were wanted by the mother country, in consequence of the growing expense to which she was put by the French invasion.57

The colonies are depicted as hopelessly exposed and being at the mercy of the metropolitan “greed”. The Spanish motherland itself was, according to the Robertson brothers, affected by many structural evils starting with an “imbecile king”, “a corrupt nobility” as well as “a powerful, bigoted, and tyrannical priesthood”.58 Another anecdote shows, for instance, how Francia did not accept any gifts at all. Rengger describes the scene of their first official meeting with Dr. Francia, when the dictator noticed a print representing Napoleon Bonaparte Rengger was carrying among his documents.59 He took it up, and examined it with great interest, when I told him whose likeness it was. He then began conversing familiarly upon the affairs of Europe, with which he seemed to be better acquainted than I could have supposed.60

Then, Rengger continues: On coming away, I left the portrait of Buonaparte on his table, thinking he would have been glad to have it; he sent it after me by an officer, with

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an order to ask the price I set on it. As I did not wish to accept money for it, it being of little value, and as the Dictator had made it a rule never to receive a present, the miniature remained in my possession.61

For Rengger and Longchamp it was probably important to point out this character trait, because it indicated a discrepancy with respect to the collective image of former colonial officeholders, and because it compensated other more problematic traits of his character. Another way the Swiss found to underline his virtues, was the rejection of nepotism as the next example demonstrates: Two of his nephews, officers in the regular troops at the commencement of the revolution, were the first whom he dismissed the service, after he had become Dictator, for no other reason than the fear he had that they might presume upon their relationship.62

This raises the question whether these measures were straightforward steps to improve the young national administration, or rather for the sake of selling an image of an incorruptible and selfless ruler. There were nonetheless also alternative versions of Francia’s “ethos”. English traveller Alexander Caldcleugh (1795–1858) pointed out in his 1825 travelogue that one of Francia’s first steps after becoming dictator was to appoint two of his nephews as personal secretaries; i.e. a prime example of nepotism.63 The narrative at the basis of this article is simple: the independence from Spanish rule and the creation of new nations no longer subject to the distant Crown was the starting point also for the elimination of the many evils of state administration, no matter whether judicial, executive, commercial or ecclesiastical ones. The transparency of a system with control instances, with officeholders committed to an ethos now obliged to the new republic, to be literally understood as a “common wealth”— where the nation’s welfare was set above particular interests—was a revolutionary idea. However, the struggle for emancipation became one among the young republics, also against each other, and in some cases actual civil wars. The Robertson brothers saw in those struggles a consequence of the combination between some individuals’ seek for “their own aggrandisement at the expense of the public weal” and “the system of corrupt government and narrow policy, left as an heirloom […] by the bigoted mother-country to her oppressed offspring in the colonies”.64 Moreover, despite praising

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the dictator’s rectitude, the same authors perceived the side effects of the authoritarian remedy against corruption to be as follows: “You will see a simple, fine, confiding people, that had been comparatively happy under the régime of Old Spain reduced to wretchedness and imbecility, under the iron rule of one who has yet the audacity to style himself a ‘patriot’”.65 If we roughly sketch the main lines on the account about Francia, we may recognise a pattern based on the assumption of juxtaposition between the different notions of honour. The corrupt judge claimed an obsolete kind of honour, corrupted itself by bigotry and hypocrisy, but based on the judge’s belonging to a particular privileged estate or caste. This provides a deep contrast with Francia’s honour defined by his radical and intransigent behaviour, despite his Creole background.

General Juan Manuel De Rosas: “…A Man Whose Crimes Have no Redeeming Quality”66 It is probably no exaggeration to claim that early post-colonial Spanish America became the home of several “iron rules”. Particularly worthy of mention is that of General Juan Manuel de Rosas, who was twice Governor of Buenos Aires—between 1829 and 1832 and again, with the sum of public power, between 1835 and 1852. Rosas was born in Buenos Aires in 1793 to a family of wealthy estancieros devoted to cattle-breeding. After his marriage, he abandoned the parental estancia to become independent. Thus, he built up his prestige upon the image of a self-made man.67 Charles Darwin was bedazzled by Rosas, and his reputation of an efficient gaucho leader and politician, when they met in 1833.68 His rule was characterised by a high degree of political violence against dissidents, mainly Unitarians who fought for a centralist Argentine nation-state, opposed to the Federalists. This political violence was mostly perpetrated through the members of the armed wing of the Sociedad Popular Restauradora, the so-called mazorca, literally “corn cob”, sometimes referred to by means of a macabre pun as más-horca, i.e. “more gibbets”.69 The governor’s involvement in belligerences such as the Anglo-French Blockade and the Uruguayan Civil War was the prompt for many pamphlets and articles about Rosas and his regime, circulating between Western Europe and South America, taking sides either in favour or against him.

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José Rivera Indarte (1814–1845) was an Argentine poet and journalist who had originally supported General Rosas, but later changed sides and became his detractor.70 In 1843, he published the pamphlet Rosas y sus opositores where he scrutinised the regime under different points of view. References to corruption are recurrent, although he points out both Rosas’ corruption of morals and the political one, resulting in an enrichment of the dictator’s wealth as well as that of his partners. Natalia Volosin has recently used the term “kleptocracy” to refer to the corruption, misappropriation and extortion practices between 1827 and the end of Rosas’ regime.71 As a matter of fact, Rivera Indarte criticised the misappropriation of the pensions for war victims. The financial system of Buenos Aires became one of scandalous theft. We will be very brief on this point for now, because we have something to say when we deal with the pensions system in its current administration. The compensation decreed by the Court for those who had suffered losses in the war, was for him [General Rosas] and his main supporters a source of personal wealth. The damages of his adversaries had been immense, but he ordered them to be appraised very low, and did so in such a way that, desperate for the holders to be able to obtain the payment of their tickets or liquidations, they alienated them to Rosas’ agents.72

The author claimed that close collaborators of Rosas, such as Minister Agustín Garrigós, profited from the illicit enrichment. In this particular case, it derived from the expropriation of the exiled physician Juan José Montes de Oca: Garrigós, a miserable clerk, with a salary at its best of eight thousand paper pesos, today boasts a scandalous fortune. His farms are many and of great value. The house in which he lives richly furnished, with part of the menage stolen from Dr. Montesdeoca [sic], is accusing his infamous thefts, and the corruption of the tyrant who tolerates them.73

The dictator’s camarilla and his close collaborators are, in fact, according to Historian Jürgen Osterhammel, a keystone for the perpetuation of dictatorial rule in general.74 Rivera Indarte, who took sides for the sieged Montevideans and their former President José Fructuoso Rivera (1784– 1854), compared the latter with Rosas in terms of wealth, providing a Manichaean dichotomy:

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General [Fructuoso] Rivera, in spite of everything Rosas says, is poor in fortune, while his pure accuser [General Rosas] lives in a non-inherited opulence, for which he does not work and which always increases. General Rivera is frugal and has simple habits. The cutthroat Rosas, his slanderer, is vicious, corrupt and lavish. These few words demonstrate more truths than a justification of many pages.75

Then, Rivera Indarte presented General Rosas as the exception within a tradition of honourable state servants since the foundation of independent Argentina: Since there has been an independent [Argentine] government, none of the distinguished men who have presided over the State have been awarded extraordinary prizes for it; but Rosas, had the war ended with Lavalle, demanded 725,000 pesos, which, reduced to silver, brought 130,000 patacones, for the damages he had received in the war. What were these damages? Three to four thousand heads [of cattle] that General Lavalle took from his estancia to supply the town of Buenos-Ayres and that were sold for a commission to the highest bidder, depositing the product in the Bank where Rosas found it.76

Thus, Rosas was reimbursed for a loss which had not happened, Rivera Indarte claims. The dissident portrays an image of utmost greed, pride, cruelty and unscrupulousness, but where the Spanish colonial past no longer plays any particular role. There might be more than one reason for this. Since Rivera Indarte was born in 1814, he did not experience colonial rule himself, although he must have learned the history of preindependent Argentina at school and in the sharing of collective national memory. As a landowner and considering the ongoing war on the southern border against the indigenous people, under Rosas’ rule land was the main form of property and also the main source of income. Thus, land grants and confiscation were common policies to reward his supporters and punish his enemies.77 The practices of misappropriation perpetrated by the rosist regime were also perceived by foreigners. Swiss mercenary and adventurer Heinrich Trachsler claimed in his travelogue: The good Argentines might have retained Spanish sovereignty in his place, for they would certainly not have gone any worse under this [colonial]

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government than they do now under the federal government and under that rough, uneducated gaucho general Rosas, and his creatures.78

Trachsler, whose witness might be questioned since he left South America already in 1835, i.e. at the very beginning of Rosas’ second (and definitely more ruthless) tenure, mentions the arbitrary arrests and executions as well as the confiscations of property belonging to the Unitarians. Therefore, Rosas’ brutality makes appear the independence from Spain vain. An anonymous British citizen residing in Montevideo during the siege addressed a public writing to Lord Aberdeen in 1844, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. The text, which assumes the form of a complaint in front of a global audience, is permeated by a sentiment of indignation. Although one can assess corruption to be a lesser crime compared to the assassinations, tortures, rapines and acts of blasphemy, the author provides a quotation from an English language newspaper published in Montevideo—The Britannia— stating: The national hospitals for the sick, for the insane, for the houseless poor and abandoned orphans, have been suppressed; and the funds belonging to them, appropriated by the Government to itself under the pretext of an engagement, never fulfilled, to provide for their support.79

The critique of corruption is combined with the pursuit of empathy (or compassion) by emphasising the precarious condition of sick people and foundlings under Rosas’ rule. Such comments were relevant because the French intervention in the River Plate in favour of the besieged Montevideans and against General Rosas had much of humanitarian reasons, aimed at defending a supposed (French) enlightened heritage embodied by Rosas’ opponents.80 In other words, the terrible news from the River Plate inculcated sentiments of solidarity and compassion which, in terms of the history of emotions, had started with abolitionist ideas half a century before.81 In 1845, Argentine anti-rosist dissident Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–1888) published what became a lieu de mémoire of Latin American literature. Facundo was a public denunciation of General Rosas, articulated through the dichotomy of civilisation—embodied by the city and its enlightened heritage—and barbarism, i.e. the countryside with its gauchos and their brutal manners. Following that same dichotomy,

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Sarmiento refers to Bernardino Rivadavia (1780–1845), who was former minister and President of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata until 1827, and a most efficient visionary and tireless reformer as well as a fellow Unitarian, like the author. Meanwhile, Rosas is positioned as his ruthless counterpart: [T]he Banco Nacional is an institution so deeply rooted that it has saved society from the misery to which the tyrant [Rosas] would have led it. Above all, however fantastic and inopportune that great system—toward which all the peoples of America are now heading and hurrying—might have been, at least it was easy and tolerable for people; and however much men without conscience may scream about him every day, Rivadavia never spilled a drop of blood or destroyed anyone’s property, descending voluntarily from the luxury of the presidency to the noble, humble poverty of the exile. Rosas, who so slanders him, would drown in the lake formed by all the blood he himself has spilled; and the forty million pesos from the national treasury and the fifty from private fortunes that Rosas has consumed in ten years to support the interminable war that his brutalities have ignited, in the hands of that fatuous dreamer, Rivadavia, would have been turned into canals for navigation, great, built-up cities, and many establishment for public utility.82

The accusation of maladministration is performed on the basis of a Manichaean comparison. Emotions of deep anger and contempt, not only for General Rosas and the eponymous caudillo Juan Facundo Quiroga, but for the entire countryside unveil a rather arrogant and elitist stance. The Enlightenment discourse enforced arguments of moral superiority with bodily and racist components. In the words of historian Margrit Pernau: “Feelings were an indicator of a present level of development that divided the world up between the civilised, the decadent and the barbaric; but, at the same time, feelings were themselves the basis of all development”.83 The terms “corruption” and “corrupt” are commonly used in a generic sense, not just referring to the illicit and shameless accumulation of tangible goods, but as a denomination for the dictator and his thugs’ malicious and infamous nature. In 1849, a collection of newspaper articles appeared in Montevideo. This time, the expropriations by Rosas show up as prominently as in the title, flanking the narrative of sanguinary crimes.

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Although, as we have already said in our articles on Rosas’ robberies called confiscations, the money that was deposited in his cash box, as a result of them [the robberies/confiscations], only represents a minimal part of the values confiscated, however, in his states […] you can see the enormous amounts that were deposited belonging to [Lucas] Gonzalez, and calculate the immense capital that Rosas stole from his family: as they deposited other very large [sums], belonging to his nephew, Mr. Borbon, a Buenos Aires citizen, whose property was also confiscated, and who also saved his life by hiding and taking refuge in Montevideo.84

Personal enrichment seems to thus be the dictator’s sole purpose. Nevertheless, considering the amount of power he was bestowed within 1835, one could question whether those confiscations were really illegal and, therefore, whether they can be considered phenomena of corruption. Here approaches from legal history, moral philosophy and the history of emotions might provide different answers.

Conclusions If we resume the idea of colonial corruption as a combination of the opportune distance from the motherland as supreme authority and the officeholders’ passions, vices and pursuits of prestige, we will easily conclude that after the emancipation the latter aspect remained. With regard to the “pathogenic” interpretation of corruption, we have already remarked how Villarroel resorted to medical metaphors. This means a rationalistic view, typical for the Enlightenment and positivism and linked to an idea of progress. The same is true for Reverend William Robertson who speaks of an “infection”, and for Franz Kottenkamp’s “antidote” (German Gegenmittel ). In other words: corruption is a solvable problem if the adequate medicine is applied. This is also what Villarroel wants to provide: solutions, therapies and mitigations. On the opposite side, the Robertson brothers—who adopt merely a descriptive and judging attitude—used a biblical pattern to describe the episode of judicial corruption. This might suggest a definitely fatalistic stance, where the emplotment (Hayden White)85 is at least partially provided by divine providence and where the advocate’s virtues under the corrupt colony succumb to his love of power, once he had become dictator. This idea of irreversibility is also expressed through terms such as “heirloom” and “offspring”, as if corruption would be part of the new nations’

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“genetic material”, provided by the mother country. Thus, the dichotomy suggested by Christoph Rosenmüller for early modern Spanish America— i.e. innate versus performative corruption—seems to find its continuity as a pattern of interpretation at the beginning of the nineteenth century.86 With the dictator of Paraguay, and his depiction by contemporaries, we meet the anticipation of a topos —generally accredited to early twentieth century (fascist) dictators—about a century in advance.87 Thus, the “incorrupt” Dr. Francia enjoyed an image very much shaped after Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794), l’incorruptible.88 However, with Juan Manuel de Rosas and his judgement by contemporaries, it seems that the topos of the incorrupt dictator was complemented by that of the “corrupt tyrant” Rosas, for whose practices Spanish late colonial corruption did not provide any inspiration. As already remarked, pamphlets, articles and essays on rosist corruption lacked in references to the ages of the corrupt colony—except for Trachsler’s travelogue. This is due to two reasons. Firstly, the corruption under Rosas was systematic in the sense that it permeated the entire state administration and was even an instrument of oppression, while the practices under Spanish rule have to be regarded as a sort of organic or systemic corruption. Furthermore, there was no need to resort to such a remote antithesis as Spaniards versus patriots, since Argentina suffered, since the 1820s, from a never-ending civil war, with the potential of removing late Bourbon corruption practices from collective memory. Secondly, Rosas’ corruption was regarded as a lesser evil compared to the horrendous crimes he perpetrated by means of his militia, as reported by Rivera Indarte in his famous Tablas de Sangre (“Blood Tables”). This was a gruesome, meticulous—though exaggerated—palimpsest of Rosas’ killings, which reached Europe, too. In terms of emotions, the corruption of Rosas and his followers is backed by the use of blank terror, a sentiment which takes us back to the French revolutionary grande terreur, to Robespierre and the obsessive search for virtue. If “corruption” can be semantically deconstructed in other notions such as favouritism, patronage, venality and bribery, while on the antonymous side terms like integrity, virtue and selflessness are available,89 an analysis on the basis of emotions shows an analogous opposition. If we count for instance greed, pride and arrogance as the underlying sentiments of corruption, we might count honour, justice and equality on the other side. There is, however, one sentiment which can be located both on the side of corruption and of its mitigation. Alexis de Tocqueville

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(1805–1859) considered envy a distinguished democratic sentiment since it mobilises lower classes against the elites.90 Austrian-German sociologist Helmut Schoeck stated in his acclaimed work Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour that envy had the potential to tame the tyrant’s absolute power too, thus admitting the positive sides of this controversial sentiment.91 Following this line of thought, envy may be attributed the faculty to fight corruption as well, or it makes wealthy and successful colonial officers appear as corrupt in the eyes of invidious contemporaries. This consideration becomes particularly patent in Tanja Bührer’s contribution to this volume, about the nabobs returning to Britain. It is perhaps time to consider corruption, in all its complexities, as a corruption of particular emotions. On a global scale, emotions allow us to duly relativise and recontextualise the origins of corruption and corruptionfighting measures, whether in the form of a society losing fear for the sake of opposing a scoundrel government or questioning the source of overwhelming wealth and luxury. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for providing the grant for the open access publication (grant number P2BC-1_200622).

Notes 1. William Robertson, “The History of America,” in The Works of William Robertson (London, 1817), 4:116. 2. John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469–1716 (London: Penguin Books, 1963), 174–75; Anthony McFarlane, “Political Corruption,” in Political Corruption in Europe and Latin America, ed. Walter Little and Eduardo Posada-Carbó (Basingstoke, London: Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 43–53; see also the chapter by Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla within this volume. 3. See Anubha Anushree’s chapter within this volume with regard to honour and sympathy. 4. Michel Delon, “L’éveil de l’âme sensible,” in Histoire des émotions, ed. Alain Corbin (Paris: Seuil, 2016), 2:11–42; William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 141–72; Mónica Bolufer Peruga, “En torno a la sensibilidad dieciochesca: discursos, prácticas, paradojas,” in Las mujeres y las emociones en Europa y América. Siglos XVII–XIX , ed. María

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5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

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Luisa Candau Chacón (Santander: Editorial Universidad de Cantabria, 2016). Jens Ivo Engels, “Revolution und Panama. Korruptionsdebatten als Systemkritik in Frankreich vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Dritten Republik,” in Geld – Geschenke – Politik. Korruption im neuzeitlichen Europa, ed. Jens Ivo Engels, Andreas Fahrmeir and Alexander Nützenadel (München: Oldenbourg, 2009), 144–57. McFarlane, “Political Corruption,” 47. Robert Sparling, “Montesquieu on Corruption: Civic Purity in a PostRepublican World,” in On Civic Republicanism. Ancient Lessons for Global Politics, ed. Geoffrey C. Kellow and Neven Leddy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). For a concise conceptual history of corruption, see Jens Ivo Engels, Die Geschichte der Korruption. Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (München: S. Fischer, 2014), 165–71. McFarlane, “Political Corruption,” 48. Ibid., 41–43; Christoph Rosenmüller, “Corruption, Abuse, and Justice in the Iberian Empires,” in Corruption in the Iberian Empires. Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks, ed. Christoph Rosenmüller (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2017), 1–12; Regina Grafe and Alejandra Irigoin, “A stakeholder empire: the political economy of Spanish imperial rule in America,” The Economic History Review 65, no. 2 (April 2012): 631, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2010. 00581.x; Christoph Rosenmüller, Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues. The Court of Colonial Mexico, 1702–1710 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2008), 29–32. See for instance also John M. Niles, History of South America and Mexico (Hartford: H. Huntington, 1838), 1:116. Robertson, “History of America”, 107–108; Alexander von Humboldt, Essai politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne (Paris: F. Schoell, 1811), 1:119. Lutz Raphael, “Freiheit und Wohlstand der Nationen. Alexander von Humboldts Analysen der politischen Zustände Amerikas und das politische Denken seiner Zeit,” Historische Zeitschrift 753, no. 3 (1995). Wolfgang U. Eckart, Geschichte, Theorie und Ethik der Medizin (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2013), 159. Ute Frevert, Vergängliche Gefühle (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2013), 12; Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions. An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 80–83. Pierangelo Catalano, “Consolato e dittatura: L’ ‘esperimento’ romano della Repubblica del Paraguay (1813–1844),” in Dittatura degli antichi e dittatura dei moderni, ed. Giovanni Meloni (Roma: Editori riuniti, 1983).

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17. John Lynch, “Spanish American Independence in Recent Historiography,” in Independence and Revolution in Spanish America: Perspectives and Problems, ed. Anthony McFarlane and Eduardo Posada-Carbó (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1999), 36. 18. José Carlos Chiaramonte, La Ilustración en el Río de la Plata: Cultura eclesiástica y cultura laica durante el Virreinato (Buenos Aires: Puntosur, 1989); Gabriel Entin, “Les formes de la république: monarchie, crise et révolution au Rio de la Plata,” in Les Empires atlantiques des Lumières au libéralisme (1763–1865), ed. Federica Morelli, Clément Thibaud and Geneviève Verdo (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009); Noemí Goldman, Historia y lenguaje: los discursos de la Revolución de Mayo (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1992); O. Carlos Stoetzer, El pensamiento político en la América española durante el período de la emancipación (1789–1825) (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1966); id., “The Importance of Classical Influences during the SpanishAmerican Revolutions,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 30, no. 1 (1993), https://doi.org/10.7788/ jbla-1993-0109. 19. Douglas Botting, Alexander von Humboldt, trans. Annelie Hohenemser (München: Prestel, 2012), 242. 20. Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, trans. John Black (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1:138, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139923897; Humboldt, Essai politique, 1:103: “Le premier choix des personnes auxquelles la cour a confié les places importantes d’intendans ou de gouverneurs de province, a été très heureux. Parmi les douze qui administroient le pays en 1804, il n’y en avoit pas un seul que le public accusât de corruption ou d’un manque d’intégrité”. 21. Ursula Goetzl, “Alexander von Humboldt als Geschichtsschreiber Amerikas” (PhD diss., Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 1966), 58. 22. Myron Echenberg, Humboldt’s Mexico: In the Footsteps of the Illustrious German Scientific Traveller (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 25–33. 23. Ottmar Ette, “Transatlantic Perceptions: A Contrastive Reading of the Travels of Alexander von Humboldt and Fray Servando Teresa de Mier,” Dispositio 17, no. 42/43 (1992): 181. 24. Franz Kottenkamp, Der Unabhängigkeitskampf der spanischamerikanischen Colonien (Stuttgart: Literatur-Comptoir, 1838), 14: “Die Regierung selbst erlitt durch diese Zusammensetzung ihrer Verwaltung bedeutenden Schaden in ihren Einkünften. In einer reinen Bureaukratie, wo wegen der Entfernung vom Mittelpunkte eine strenge Controlle unmöglich ist, ergiebt sich Bestechung als nothwendige Folge. Außerdem

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26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

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hatten alle Spanier schnelle Bereicherung und Rückkehr in’s Mutterland vor Augen, Beweggründe, die Mittel um so eifriger zu benutzen, welche dieselben schnell befördern konnten”. Luis Villoro, “Rousseau en la Independencia mexicana,” Casa del Tiempo 7 (2005); Gabriel Torres Puga, “Rousseau en Nueva España: presencia y recepción antes de 1808,” in Rousseau en Iberoamérica: Lecturas e interpretaciones entre Monarquía y Revolución, ed. Gabriel Entin (Buenos Aires: Sb editorial, 2018). Virgina Gil Amate, “Hipólito Villarroel: una mirada ilustrada sobre la Ciudad de México,” Tema y variaciones de literatura: México prehispánico y colonial: miradas contemporáneas 32 (2009). For a concise biography of Hipólito Villarroel see Anel Hernández Sotelo, “Hipólito Villarroel y las enfermedades políticas de la Nueva España,” Boletín Cultural. Órgano Informativo y Cultural de la Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia 18 (2003). Carlos María de Bustamante, ed., México por dentro y fuera, bajo el gobierno de los Vireyes (México: En la imprenta del ciudadano A. Valdez, 1831), 36–40. Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire, “The View from Below: The 1789 cahiers de doléances,” in The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution, ed, David Andress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 156–60. Guillaume Mazeau, “Émotions politiques,” in Histoire des émotions, ed. Alain Corbin (Paris: Seuil, 2016), 2:98–142; Emmanuel Fureix, “Les émotions protestataires,” in Histoire des émotions, ed. Alain Corbin (Paris: Seuil, 2016), 2:299–321; Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 193. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 188. Michael Zeuske, “The French Revolution in Spanish America: With Some Reflections on Manfred Kossok as Marxist Historian of ‘Bourgeois Revolutions’,” Review 38, no. 1/2 (2015): 118. According to Clément Thibaud, the relevance of enlightened thought for the revolution in Colombia and Venezuela should be relativised. Clément Thibaud, Libérer le Nouveau Monde. La fondation des premières républiques hispaniques (Colombie et Venezuela, 1780–1820) (Bécherel: Les Perséides, 2017), 158–61. Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 146. On the significance of love for Spanish colonial administration see Alejandro Cañeque, “The Emotions of Power: Love, Anger, and Fear, or How to Rule the Spanish Empire,” in Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico, ed. Javier Villa-Flores and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2014), 92–100 and 106–13. Miguel Ángel Vásquez Meléndez, “Los ceremoniales en la construcción de la imagen del rey amable (Nueva España, 1789–1791),” in Amor e

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38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

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historia. La expresión de los afectos en el mundo de ayer, ed. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru (México D.F.: El Colegio de México, 2013), 370–75. On the emotional uncertainty of Creoles in late-colonial New Spain see Matthew D. O’Hara, “Anxiety, the Future, and Mexican Independence,” in Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico, ed. Javier Villa-Flores and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2014), 199–202. Kottenkamp, Der Unabhängigkeitskampf , 19–20: “Ein Richter aus Aragon entschied anders wie der aus Castilien, der wieder von der Entscheidung eines Andern aus Grenada [sic] abwich u. s. w. Somit gesellte sich Unsicherheit des Rechtes und des Eigenthums zu der übrigen Unbill, welche die Creolen von dem Mutterlande zu erleiden hatten. Das einzige Gegenmittel lag in der Gewalt des Vicekönigs, welcher in höchster Instanz den Spruch der Gerichte vernichten konnte, und somit die letzte unumschränkte Auslegung und Anwendung der Gesetze zu seiner übrigen Gewalt hinzufügte. Die Folge derselben mag man sich leicht vorstellen. Unter den Creolen herrschte die allgemeine Meinung, kein Prozeß gegen eingeborene Spanier könne von ihnen ohne größere Bestechung gewonnen werden”. This biographical sketch is based on Julio César Chaves, El Supremo Dictador. Biografía de José Gaspar de Francia (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1964). See further Moisés Prieto, “«History’s So Strong». The Topos of Historia Magistra Vitae and the Re-Discovery of Dictatorship in Latin America,” History of Humanities 5, no. 1 (2020): 230–37, https://doi. org/10.1086/707700. On the practice of power under Francia’s rule and the meaning of “dictating” in this particular context, see Nora Esperanza Bouvet, Poder y escritura. El doctor Francia y la construcción del Estado paraguayo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2009). Barbara Potthast and Ignacio Telesca, “¿Nueva jurisprudencia o pragmatismo político? Paraguay y su lucha por mantener la independencia,” in Juristas de la independencia, ed. José María Pérez Collados and Samuel Barbosa Rodrigues (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2012). For this chapter, I will use the English translation of 1827. Leila Gómez, Iluminados y tránsfugas. Relatos de viajeros y ficciones nacionales en Argentina, Paraguay y Perú (Frankfurt/Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2009), 134–35. Johann Rudolph Rengger and Marcelin Longchamp, The Reign of Doctor Joseph Gaspard Roderick de Francia in Paraguay Being an Account of a Six Years’ Residence in That Republic (London: Thomas Hurst, Edward Chance & Co., 1827), 6–7.

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45. Charles Jones, “Robertson, John Parish,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed May 24, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/ 23805. 46. Günter Kahle, “Ein südamerikanischer Diktator, Dr. Francia von Paraguay, im Spiegel der europäischen Geschichtsschreibung,” Saeculum 15 (1964): 254, https://doi.org/10.7788/saeculum.1964.15.jg.249. 47. John P. Robertson and William P. Robertson, Four Years in Paraguay (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1838), 2:27–29. 48. Thomas Carlyle, “Dr Francia,” in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished by Thomas Carlyle (London: Chapman and Hall, 1847), 4:282–83. 49. Rosenmüller, “Corruption, Abuse, and Justice,” 4. This corresponds to Natalie Z. Davis’ remarks on sixteenth-century France. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 87. 50. Pilar López Bejarano, “«Empapelar» al enemigo. El recurso a los procesos judiciales como estrategia de la acción política (Nueva Granada entre colonia y república),” in Justicias, agentes y jurisdicciones. De la Monarquía Hispánica a los Estados Nacionales (España y América, siglos xvi–xix), ed. Elisa Caselli (Madrid, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica de España/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2016), 96–99. 51. Valentina Bravo-Olmedo, “«Le ofreció dinero para que no lo demandase». Justicia negociada y género en prácticas de resolución de conflictos por pensión de alimentos. Chile Central, 1788–1840,” Trashumante. Revista Americana de Historia Social 11 (January–June 2018): 159–60, https:// doi.org/10.17533/udea.trahs.n11a07; Bianca Premo, “Lo extrajudicial. Between court and community in the Spanish empire,” in The Uses of Justice in Global Perspective, 1600–1900, ed. Griet Vermeesch, Manon van der Heijden, and Jaco Zuijderduijn (London: Routledge, 2019), 187–89. 52. Bianca Premo, The Enlightenment on Trial. Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 3 (original emphasis). 53. Ibid., 185. 54. Ute Frevert, Emotions in History—Lost and Found (Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2011), 40–42. 55. Christian Büschges, “«Las leyes del honor». Honor y estratificación social en el distrito de la audiencia de Quito (siglo xviii),” Revista de Indias LVII, no. 209 (1997): 57–62, https://doi.org/10.3989/revindias.1997. i209.795. 56. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 203; id., “Sentimentalism and Its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution,” The Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1 (2000): 145, https://doi.org/10.1086/ 315931.

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57. John P. Robertson and William P. Robertson, Letters on Paraguay (London: John Murray, 1838), 1:22. 58. Ibid., 1:20. 59. For a description of this scene in terms of the history of emotions see Moisés Prieto, “Dictadura y sentimiento: las emociones en un relato europeo sobre el Doctor Francia, Supremo Dictador del Paraguay,” Iberoamericana 18, no. 69 (September–December 2018): 136–38, https://dx.doi.org/10.18441/ibam.18.2018.69.127-150. 60. Rengger and Longchamp, The Reign of Doctor Joseph Gaspard Roderick de Francia, 40. 61. Ibid., 42. 62. Ibid., 207. 63. Alexander Caldcleugh, Travels in South America, During the Years 1819– 20–21 (London: John Murray, 1825), 1:130–31. 64. Robertson and Robertson, Letters on Paraguay, 1:89–90. 65. Ibid., 1:92–93. 66. Rosas and some of the Atrocities of his Dictatorship in the River Plate (London: Simmons and Clowes, 1844), 6. 67. John Lynch, Argentine Caudillo. Juan Manuel de Rosas (Oxford: SR Books, 2001), 14; id., Argentine Dictator: Juan Manuel de Rosas 1829– 1852 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 14; Raúl O. Fradkin and Jorge Gelman, Juan Manuel de Rosas. La construcción de un liderazgo político (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2015), 45–50. 68. Lynch, Argentine Dictator, 3–5. 69. Fradkin and Gelman, Juan Manuel de Rosas, 301–305; Lynch, Argentine Dictator, 201–46. 70. Gabriel Di Meglio, ¡Mueran los salvajes unitarios! La Mazorca y la política en tiempos de Rosas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2007), 58. 71. Natalia A. Volosin, Corruption in Argentina. Towards an Institutional Approach (London: Routledge, 2019), 57–58; Lynch, Argentine Caudillo, 129. 72. José Rivera Indarte, Rosas y sus opositores (Montevideo: Imprenta del Nacional, 1843), 221: “El sistema financiero de Buenos Aires se convirtió en esa administracion en uno de escandaloso latrocinio. Seremos por ahora muy breves en este punto, porque algo tenemos que decir cuando tratemos del sistema rentístico en su actual administracion. Las indemnizaciones decretadas por la Sala para los que hubiesen sufrido pérdidas en la guerra, fué para él [General Rosas] una fuente de riqueza personal y para sus principales partidarios. Los menoscabos de sus adversarios habian sido inmensos, pero él los mandó evaluar muy bajo, é hizo de modo, que desesperados los tenedores de poder conseguir el pago de sus boletos ó liquidaciones, los enagenaron á los agentes de Rosas”.

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73. Ibid., 308: “Garrigós, misero oficinista, con un sueldo en su mejor época de ocho mil pesos papel, ostenta hoy una fortuna escandalosa. Sus fincas son muchas y de crecido valor. La casa en que vive ricamente amueblada, con parte del menage robado al Dr. Montesdeoca [sic], está acusando sus infames latrocinios, y la corrupcion del tirano que los tolera”. 74. Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: a global history of the nineteenth century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 576. 75. Rivera Indarte, Rosas y sus opositores, 105: “El general [Fructuoso] Rivera, apesar de todo lo que dice Rosas, es pobre de fortuna, mientras su puro acusador [General Rosas] vive en una opulencia no heredada, para la que no trabaja y que siempre se aumenta. El General Rivera es frugal y de costumbres sencillas. El degollador Rosas su calumniador es vicioso, corrompido y fastuoso. Estas pocas palabras demuestran mas verdades que una justificacion de muchas paginas”. 76. Ibid., 301: “Desde que existe gobierno independiente, á ninguno de los hombres distinguidos que han presidido el Estado, se han acordado premios extraordinarios por ello; pero Rosas se hizo dar acabada la guerra con Lavalle 725 mil pesos, que reducidos á plata importaron 130 mil patacones por los perjuicios que había recibido en la guerra. ¿Cuales éran estos perjuicios? Tres á cuatro mil cabezas que de su estancia sacó el General Lavalle para abastecer el pueblo de Buenos-Ayres y que se vendieron por una commission al mas alto postor, depositando el producto en el Banco donde lo encontró Rosas”. 77. Lynch, Argentine Dictator, 64–69; Silvia Ratto, “¿Finanzas públicas o negocios privados? El sistema de racionamiento del negocio pacífico de indios en la época de Rosas,” in Caudillismos rioplatenses. Nuevas miradas a un viejo problema, ed. Noemí Goldman and Ricardo Salvatore (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1998), 259–64. 78. Heinrich Trachsler, Reisen, Schicksale und tragikomische Abenteuer eines Schweizers (Zürich: Verlag von Heinrich Trachsler, 1839), 698–99: “[Die] guten Argentiner hätten an seiner Statt eben so gut die spanische Oberherrschaft beibehalten können, denn sie wären unter dieser Regierung gewiß nicht übler gefahren, als jetzt unter den Föderalen und unter diesem rohen, ungebildeten Gauchosgeneral Rosas, und seinen Kreaturen”. 79. Rosas and some of the Atrocities, 32. 80. Edward Shawcross, France, Mexico and Informal Empire in Latin America, 1820–1867. Equilibrium in the New World (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 60. 81. Frevert, Emotions in History, 200–201; Bertrand Taithe, “Empathies, soins et compassions: les émotions humanitaires,” in Histoire des émotions, ed. Jean-Jacques Courtine (Paris: Seuil, 2017), 3: 365–68.

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82. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, trans. Kathleen Ross (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 124. 83. Margrit Pernau, “Civility and Barbarism: Emotions as Criteria of Difference,” in Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000, ed. Ute Frevert et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 256. 84. Para la historia. Efemérides sangrientas de la dictadura de Juan Manuel de Rosas. Con un apéndice de sus robos llamados confiscaciones (Montevideo: El Comercio del Plata, 1849), 71–72: “Aunque, como ya hemos dicho en nuestros artículos sobre los Robos de Rosas llamados Confiscaciones, lo entrado en dinero en la caja de este, como producto de ellas, solo representa una parte mínima de los valores confiscados, con todo, en sus Estados de esas entradas, que allí publicamos, pueden verse las injentes sumas que ingresaron pertenecientes á [Lucas] Gonzalez, y calcúlarse el inmenso capital que Rosas robó á su familia: como ingresaron otras muy cuantiosas, pertenecientes al sobrino de aquel, el Sr. Borbon, porteño, cuyos bienes fueron igualmente confiscados, y que tambien salvó su vida, ocultándose y asilándose en Montevideo”. 85. I am referring here to Hayden White’s notion of “narrative emplotment”. Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 7–11. 86. Christoph Rosenmüller, “De lo innato a lo performativo: dos conceptos rivales de la corrupción, siglos xvii y xviii,” in «Dádivas, dones y dineros». Aportes a una nueva historia de la corrupción en América Latina desde el imperio español a la modernidad, ed. Christoph Rosenmüller and Stephan Ruderer (Frankfurt/Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2016). 87. Engels, Die Geschichte der Korruption, 325–29. On the nexus between corruption and dictatorship in eighteenth and nineteenth century France and Italy, see Cesare Vetter, “Dictature: les vicissitudes d’un mot. France et Italie (XVIII et XIX siècles).” Révolution Française.net. Accessed May 22, 2020, https://revolution-francaise.net/2008/03/01/212-dictaturevicissitudes-mot-france-italie-xviii-xix-siecles. 88. David P. Jordan, “The Robespierre problem,” in Robespierre, ed. William Doyle and Colin Haydon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 18 and 21–22; Peter McPhee, Robespierre. A Revolutionary Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 233. For a juxtaposition of Dr. Francia and Robespierre, see Georges Fournial, “Rodriguez de Francia dictateur «robespierriste» du Paraguay (1814–1840),” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 242 (1980), https://doi.org/10.3406/ahrf. 1980.4230. 89. Engels, Die Geschichte der Korruption, 166.

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90. Fureix, “Les émotions protestataires,” 302. 91. Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, trans. Michael Glenny and Betty Ross (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1970), 198–99 and 350–51.

References Adelman, Jeremy. Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Beaurepaire, Pierre-Yves. “The View from Below: The 1789 cahiers de doléances.” In The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution, edited by David Andress, 149–63. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Bolufer Peruga, Mónica. “En torno a la sensibilidad dieciochesca: discursos, prácticas, paradojas.” In Las mujeres y las emociones en Europa y América. Siglos XVII–XIX, edited by María Luisa Candau Chacón, 29–56. Santander: Editorial Universidad de Cantabria, 2016. Botting, Douglas. Alexander von Humboldt. Translated by Annelie Hohenemser. München: Prestel, 2012. Bouvet, Nora Esperanza. Poder y escritura. El doctor Francia y la construcción del Estado paraguayo. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2009. Bravo-Olmedo, Valentina. “«Le ofreció dinero para que no lo demandase». Justicia negociada y género en prácticas de resolución de conflictos por pensión de alimentos. Chile Central, 1788–1840.” Trashumante. Revista Americana de Historia Social 11 (January–June 2018): 144–63. https://doi. org/10.17533/udea.trahs.n11a07. Büschges, Christian. “«Las leyes del honor». Honor y estratificación social en el distrito de la audiencia de Quito (siglo xviii).” Revista de Indias LVII, no. 209 (1997): 55–84. https://doi.org/10.3989/revindias.1997.i209.795. Bustamante, Carlos María de (ed.). México por dentro y fuera, bajo el gobierno de los Vireyes. México: En la imprenta del ciudadano A. Valdez, 1831. Caldcleugh, Alexander. Travels in South America, During the Years 1819–20–21. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1825. Cañeque, Alejandro. “The Emotions of Power: Love, Anger, and Fear, or How to Rule the Spanish Empire.” In Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico, edited by Javier Villa-Flores and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, 89–121. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2014. Carlyle, Thomas. “Dr Francia.” In Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished by Thomas Carlyle, 253–312. 4 vols. 3rd ed. London: Chapman and Hall, 1847.

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Fureix, Emmanuel. “Les émotions protestataires.” In Histoire des émotions, edited by Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine and Georges Vigarello, 299–321. 3 vols. Paris: Seuil, 2016–2017. Gil Amate, Virgina. “Hipólito Villarroel: una mirada ilustrada sobre la Ciudad de México.” Tema y variaciones de literatura: México prehispánico y colonial: miradas contemporáneas 32 (2009): 255–87. Goetzl, Ursula. “Alexander von Humboldt als Geschichtsschreiber Amerikas.” PhD diss., Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 1966. Goldman, Noemí. Historia y lenguaje: los discursos de la Revolución de Mayo. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1992. Gómez, Leila. Iluminados y tránsfugas. Relatos de viajeros y ficciones nacionales en Argentina, Paraguay y Perú. Frankfurt/Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2009. Grafe, Regina, and Alejandra Irigoin. “A stakeholder empire: the political economy of Spanish imperial rule in America.” The Economic History Review 65, no. 2 (April 2012): 609–51. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289. 2010.00581.x. Hernández Sotelo, Anel. “Hipólito Villarroel y las enfermedades políticas de la Nueva España.” Boletín Cultural. Órgano Informativo y Cultural de la Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia 18 (2003): 13–24. Humboldt, Alexander von. Essai politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne. 5 vols. Paris: F. Schoell, 1811. Humboldt, Alexander von. Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain. 2 vols. Translated by John Black. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139923897. Jones, Charles. “Robertson, John Parish.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Accessed May 22, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/23805. Jordan, David P. “The Robespierre problem.” In Robespierre, edited by William Doyle and Colin Haydon, 17–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Kahle, Günter. “ Ein südamerikanischer Diktator, Dr. Francia von Paraguay, im Spiegel der europäischen Geschichtsschreibung.” Saeculum 15 (1964): 249– 59. https://doi.org/10.7788/saeculum.1964.15.jg.249. Kottenkamp, Franz. Der Unabhängigkeitskampf der spanisch-amerikanischen Colonien. Stuttgart: Literatur-Comptoir, 1838. López Bejarano, Pilar. “«Empapelar» al enemigo. El recurso a los procesos judiciales como estrategia de la acción política (Nueva Granada entre colonia y república).” In Justicias, agentes y jurisdicciones. De la Monarquía Hispánica a los Estados Nacionales (España y América, siglos xvi–xix), edited by Elisa Caselli, 79–102. Madrid, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica de España/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2016.

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Lynch, John. Argentine Dictator: Juan Manuel de Rosas 1829–1852. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Lynch, John. “Spanish American Independence in Recent Historiography.” In Independence and Revolution in Spanish America: Perspectives and Problems, edited by Anthony McFarlane and Eduardo Posada-Carbó, 13–42. London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1999. Lynch, John. Argentine Caudillo. Juan Manuel de Rosas. Oxford: SR Books, 2001. Mazeau, Guillaume. “Émotions politiques: la Révolution française.” In Histoire des émotions, edited by Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine and Georges Vigarello, 98–142. 3 vols. Paris: Seuil, 2016–2017. McFarlane, Anthony. “Political Corruption and Reform in Bourbon Spanish America.” In Political Corruption in Europe and Latin America, edited by Walter Little and Eduardo Posada-Carbó, 41–63. Basingstoke, London: Macmillan / St. Martin’s Press, 1996. McPhee, Peter. Robespierre. A Revolutionary Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Niles, John M. History of South America and Mexico. 2 vols. Hartford: H. Huntington, 1838. O’Hara, Matthew D. “Anxiety, the Future, and Mexican Independence.” In Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico, edited by Javier Villa-Flores and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, 198–220. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2014. Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: a global history of the nineteenth century. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Para la historia. Efemérides sangrientas de la dictadura de Juan Manuel de Rosas. Con un apéndice de sus robos llamados confiscaciones. Montevideo: El Comercio del Plata, 1849. Pernau, Margrit. “Civility and Barbarism: Emotions as Criteria of Difference.” In Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000, edited by Ute Frevert et al., 230–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Plamper, Jan. The History of Emotions. An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Potthast, Barbara, and Ignacio Telesca. “¿Nueva jurisprudencia o pragmatismo político? Paraguay y su lucha por mantener la independencia.” In Juristas de la independencia, edited by José María Pérez Collados and Samuel Barbosa Rodrigues, 521–82. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2012. Premo, Bianca. The Enlightenment on Trial. Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

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Premo, Bianca. “Lo extrajudicial. Between court and community in the Spanish empire.” In The Uses of Justice in Global Perspective, 1600–1900, edited by Griet Vermeesch, Manon van der Heijden, and Jaco Zuijderduijn, 183–97. London: Routledge, 2019. Prieto, Moisés. “«History’s So Strong». The Topos of Historia Magistra Vitae and the Re-Discovery of Dictatorship in Latin America.” History of Humanities 5, no. 1 (2020): 225–49. https://doi.org/10.1086/707700. Prieto, Moisés. “Dictadura y sentimiento: las emociones en un relato europeo sobre el Doctor Francia, Supremo Dictador del Paraguay.” Iberoamericana 18, no. 69 (September–December 2018): 127–50. https://doi.org/10.18441/ ibam.18.2018.69. Raphael, Lutz. “Freiheit und Wohlstand der Nationen. Alexander von Humboldts Analysen der politischen Zustände Amerikas und das politische Denken seiner Zeit.” Historische Zeitschrift 260, no. 3 (1995): 749–76. https://doi.org/10.1524/hzhz.1995.260.jg.749. Ratto, Silvia. “¿Finanzas públicas o negocios privados? El sistema de racionamiento del negocio pacífico de indios en la época de Rosas.” In Caudillismos rioplatenses. Nuevas miradas a un viejo problema, edited by Noemí Goldman and Ricardo Salvatore, 241–65. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1998. Reddy, William M. “Sentimentalism and Its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution.” The Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1 (2000): 109–52. https://doi.org/10.1086/315931. Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Rengger, Johann Rudolph and Marcelin Longchamp, The Reign of Doctor Joseph Gaspard Roderick de Francia in Paraguay Being an Account of a Six Years’ Residence in That Republic. London: Thomas Hurst, Edward Chance & Co., 1827. Rivera Indarte, José. Rosas y sus opositores. Montevideo: Imprenta del Nacional, 1843. Robertson, John P., and William P. Robertson. Letters on Paraguay. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1838. Robertson, John P., and William P. Robertson. Four Years in Paraguay. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1838. Robertson, William. “The History of America.” In The Works of William Robertson. 12 vols. London, 1817. Rosas and some of the Atrocities of his Dictatorship in the River Plate. London: Simmons and Clowes, 1844. Rosenmüller, Christoph. Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues. The Court of Colonial Mexico, 1702–1710. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2008.

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CHAPTER 6

Bribery in Baroda: The Politics of Corruption in Nineteenth-Century India Mark Knights and Zak Leonard

Introduction This chapter examines two “scandals” in Baroda, a nominally independent Maratha state in Gujarat, that respectively played out from 1837–1854 to 1893–1895. In both cases, the question of “influence” on government animated a contest about what constituted corruption and how it should be dealt with. In the first scandal, accusations of khutput — described in an 1886 lexicon as “a slang term in Western India for a prevalent system of intrigue and corruption”—were inextricably tied to charges of bribery, specifically, attempts by personnel associated with the Gaekwar of Baroda’s durbar (court) to gain undue influence over British officials in the Bombay government.1 Khutput was investigated by a zealous East India Company (EIC) official, James Outram, whose

M. Knights (B) Warwick University, Coventry, England e-mail: [email protected] Z. Leonard University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Kroeze et al. (eds.), Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era, Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9_6

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assertion that the colonial regime favoured these bribers proved controversial; he was removed in 1852 from his post for undermining the gaekwar’s (prince’s) sovereignty and casting aspersions on his fellow officers.2 Even after Baroda was transformed into a “model” state in the later nineteenth century, bribery cases continued to attract public attention. At the request of British Resident Colonel John Biddulph, a Commission in the 1890s investigated thirty-five charges levied against Vasudev Sadashew Bapat, an Assistant Settlement Officer in the Alienation (or Barkhali) Department that interrogated landholders’ hereditary claims and hence oversaw a sensitive part of the land revenue system. Examining the Outram debacle alongside the Bapat case prompts three key questions. Why would British authorities sanction inquiries into corruption in some instances while obstructing them in others? Did the colonial personnel involved in these affairs conceptualize corruption in dissimilar ways? And how did these investigations attain a level of notoriety throughout India and the metropole? The two cases raise the issue of how corruption scandals could evolve into public affairs in a manner that officials had not intended and which had significant implications for imperial governance. Outram’s actions stimulated public comment in India, while reformers in Britain who publicized his mistreatment during the renewal of the EIC’s charter put the Bombay administration and Company more generally on the defensive. In the Bapat case, the gaekwar’s unexpected rejection of the Commission’s guilty verdict provoked significant ethnic strife in Baroda and brought the Residency itself into disrepute. The following sections of this chapter will provide an overview of the two cases, probe officials’ politically motivated approaches to corruption, clarify how understandings of corruption differed, and reveal how efforts to consolidate colonial paramountcy could generate an embarrassing public backlash. In this chapter, we attribute the ambiguous criminalization of corruption to the ongoing adjudication of political relations between the semi-sovereign Baroda state and the “paramount” colonial power. In the late eighteenth century, Baroda had entered into a subsidiary alliance with the EIC, which directly ruled areas of land that were in close proximity to, and to some extent intermingled, with the Indian state.3 By the 1840s, the Bombay government was intent on dominating Baroda’s princely rulers through informal influence. After the substitution of Crown for Company rule in 1858, the British still sought indirect control. In 1875, they deposed Malhar Rao on the grounds of “incorrigible misrule” and

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installed the young Sayajirao III, who obtained sovereign powers upon reaching his majority in 1881.4 In both contexts, certain British officials sought to retain their ability to intervene in Baroda’s internal politics and strategically pursued or ignored corruption cases to this end. Between the 1840s and 1850s, high-ranking members of the Bombay government strategically frustrated or neutralized prosecutions of indigenous officials and bankers who were either attached to the Residency or held “guarantees” from the Company, even though Outram thought he had compiled more than sufficient evidence of their corrupting influence. In the 1890s, Biddulph and his colleagues positively promoted a prosecution against an allegedly corrupt official, Bapat, to regain their influence. In so doing, they aimed to chasten the strong-willed Sayajirao and undermine the influence of F. A. H. Elliot, his former tutor, adviser, and head of the Baroda Alienation Department. These affairs revealed a lack of consensus in colonial circles as to what counted as corruption and to what extent it was tolerable. This diversity of responses stemmed in part from the legal ambiguity of the relations between the princely state and the British. Such uncertainty fostered both the attempts at undue indigenous influence—members of the khutput ring saw themselves as virtually immune from prosecution, a perception apparently shared by the Bombay hierarchy—and the British determination to retain or increase influence. Having signed a treaty in 1805 to pay for protection by EIC troops, the gaekwars remained vested with a nebulous amount of internal sovereignty under the supervision of an assigned British “Resident”. Historians have noted that the “Company rarely provided its Residents even with explicit principles of guidance and only occasionally with specific instructions”.5 Few were schooled in the technicalities of international law and diplomatic practice. The ensuing ambiguity resulted in chronic disputes over legal jurisdiction. As Priyasha Saksena has recently argued, there were two very different ways of regarding sovereignty in the second half of the nineteenth century: one as “divisible and flexible” and the other as “absolute and territorial”.6 The former allowed the British to enlist the princes as “‘allies’ in the imperial project, while also affirming their right to intervene in the internal affairs of the states”.7 But after the mid-1860s, some native rulers began to entertain a concept of absolute, territorial sovereignty that threatened British influence. Chief ministers such as Madhava Rao, who had overseen Baroda’s transformation into a “model” state, urged these princes to replicate European administrative forms and thereby rob the

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Government of India of any pretext for meddling. As the nature of native sovereignty remained contested, colonial agents in the residencies and provincial governments were anxious to preserve their powers of interference in princely affairs. Their level of toleration for corruption was directly informed by this concern. What constituted corruption was not always clear, whether in Britain (where electoral bribes were a problem into the late nineteenth century) or in the South Asian context.8 The Regulating Act of 1773 forbade the receipt of presents from natives, but the propriety of gifting remained ambiguous and contested.9 In 1829, Edward Colebrooke, a Resident stationed at the Mughal court in Delhi, was found guilty on twelve counts of accepting nuzzarana (a ceremonial payment to a superior) and bribes totaling £10,000. As Anubha Anushree notes in this volume, he defended his conduct by suggesting that the cessation of gift exchanges would perilously estrange the British from their “Native subjects and allies”.10 Yet Colebrooke’s censure did not dissuade later officials from attempting to replicate indigenous patronage practices. Arthur Crawford, the popular Municipal Commissioner of Bombay, was perhaps the most prominent offender in this regard in the later nineteenth century. Heavily indebted to native moneylenders, he enlisted his go-between, the Brahmin Hanmantrao Ramchandra Shirhatti, to solicit “gifts” from the revenue-collecting mamlatdars who were seeking professional favours or simply wanted to remain in Crawford’s good graces. The Commissioner upheld this patrimonial order by outfitting his Poona residence as a miniature durbar, where he received these subordinates and collected nuzzarana.11 While Crawford’s self-anointment as the virtual “king of the people” was too much for the Bombay government to bear, administrators in North India tolerated the acceptance of more modest emoluments such as daalii (traditional gifts) and dasturi (a commission to an intermediary for a service rendered) well into the twentieth century.12 Allegations of corruption in colonial India were often tied to illicit personal gain, but they could also be attributed to racially coloured views of native agents. Commentators on the Crawford case, for instance, identified Hanmantro as an “evil genius” who wielded a great influence over his employer.13 The evidence from the khutput enquiries on the matter proved conclusively that bribes were frequently paid “not to British dispensers of patronage but natives who may be supposed to have influence over them”14 . Callie Wilkinson has recently suggested that these

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fears of native manipulation were especially acute in the administrations of the princely states. While British Residents might resent their dependence on their native aides (or munshis) and stereotype them as crafty and duplicitous, a “vertical relationship of mutual obligation” could also develop that led them to acknowledge “a certain responsibility for their munshis’ welfare, even after the working relationship ended”.15 Both of these dynamics were evident in the cases that we present in this chapter. After Outram implicated the Residency’s native agent, Nursoo Punt, in a khutput ring, he became highly suspicious of Revenue Secretary Lestock Reid’s inexplicable intervention to salvage Punt’s reputation. And when Biddulph grew frustrated with the gaekwar’s sweeping fiscal reforms, he amplified rumours that Elliot had come under the thrall of his corrupted underling, Bapat.

Outram’s “Crusade” Against Khutput Outram’s run-ins with the “corruptionists” of the khuptut ring began in 1835 when he was appointed Political Agent of the Mahee Kanta, a semi-independent district of Gujarat subordinate to the Baroda Residency. A distinguished soldier known for his pacification of the turbulent Bhil tribes, Outram was sent there because the area had a reputation for lawlessness and little respect “for the British name”.16 He witnessed this firsthand when Sarabhoy, the native head of clerks and a member of the Nagur Brahmin caste, began filling the Resident’s office with “his immediate personal connections”.17 The Nagurs were a tight-knit clique united by kinship and interest, with extensive connections within the gaekwar’s durbar and Baroda’s bank. Yet time and time again, Bombay officials seemed reluctant to push prosecutions or enforce penalties against the Nagurs when they were accused of corruption, consolidating local belief that they were being secretly influenced. In 1837–1838, for example, derisory action was taken against Sarabhoy for bribery in relation to the succession of a local chieftain whose lands yielded valuable revenues. The year before, Bombay failed to pursue Motee Lall Purshotum, who had been accused of offering a bribe to an EIC officer to prevent a corruption investigation. Another of the Nagurs, Daddo Punt, was also accused of corruption in 1837, but the investigating officer was informed by his superiors that “there was no law by which a Government servant receiving bribes at Baroda could be punished otherwise than by dismissal”, a problem caused by the legal pluralism that will be discussed later. Punt

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was released and the most serious charge against him quashed.18 That nearly all those accused evaded any significant punishment was due in part to legal technicalities and the Nagurs’ intimidation of potential witnesses. Outram left Baroda in 1838 to fight in Afghanistan, but when he was appointed as Resident of Baroda in 1847, he found that khutput was “as rife and rampant as ever”.19 The peculiar relations between Bombay officials and the alleged Nagur khutputists resulted from the financial system that supported the court. Unlike many princes, the gaekwars lacked their own treasury and had long been dependent on a handful of powerful banking houses to subsidize their regimes’ operations. To secure the payback of these loans as well as their personal safety, the bankers employed a legion of Arab mercenaries who numbered 7,000 in 1802.20 In soliciting an alliance with the gaekwar, the Company raised ten lakhs of rupees to pay off the Arabs and stepped into their role as the guarantor of select bankers. An early Resident lauded this bhandari system for offering yet “another mode of extending the Company’s influence”.21 Regarded as “an act of condescension and favour”, the distribution of guarantees would aid the British in establishing profitable connections with Baroda’s “monied men”.22 For their part, the Bombay authorities believed they had obtained “the right to a uniform and systematic participation in the internal authority of the Gaikvad’s government”.23 But while the British simply pledged to safeguard guaranteed individuals “against injustice”, the inhabitants of Baroda presumed that they enjoyed unlimited protection.24 In one notorious case, guarantee-holder and ousted minister Dhackjee Dadajee managed to swindle the gaekwar out of £50,000 by claiming to possess the Company’s favour.25 Nagur bankers and their relatives who boasted hereditary guarantees also appealed to the Company to advance their legal claims and seemingly won protection from the British, even after evidence of their malfeasance came to light. The accusations centred on Baba Nafra, who had secured control over the daily management of the prominent Huree Bhugtee bank after his co-partner Bechur Samuldass died in 1845. Three months after Samuldass’s death, his younger widow, Joitabaee Setanee, had given birth to a son who stood to inherit his father’s share of the operation. When Joitabaee began to accuse Nafra of embezzlement, he hatched a scheme to secure his assets by claiming that she had not in fact given birth, but rather had purchased a child from a family of servants. Citing dubious evidence of this deception,26 Nafra ordered Joitabaee into confinement

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and returned the boy to his “ancestral” village, where he soon died from cholera. Joitabaee’s mother managed to escape to Bombay and petitioned the government to intervene on her daughter’s account. Outram was convinced that she and her dead child had been victims of Nagur foul play and began an investigation in 1847; he was soon questioning the necessity of guarantees that led malcontents like Nafra to believe that they “enjoy[ed] an immunity from all law”.27 But when ill health forced Outram to take a break from duties in the autumn of 1848, his temporary replacement, Captain French, left Joitabaee to the mercy of the panchayat (court of arbitration) in Baroda that was stacked with Nafra’s sympathizers. Upon his return in May of 1850, Outram was disturbed to find that no action had been taken against the Nagurs and that French had hastily dismissed the case, suspecting that the latter had been unduly manipulated by the Residency’s native agent, Nursoo Punt. In the past, Outram had received credible tips that Nursoo—who was closely tied by marriage alliances to Nafra—was obstructing legal cases involving Huree Bhugtee. Outram had permitted Nursoo to quietly retire, but Reid intervened and urged him to withdraw his resignation.28 In 1850, Baba Nafra’s ill-treated underlings admitted that he had bribed two servant families to claim that Joitabaee’s child was their own.29 Soon after, Outram secured the (temporary) support of the gaekwar, who authorized the seizure of Nafra’s personal papers and those of the bank.30 Although the gaekwar’s chief of police was complicit in “destroying, erasing and altering” them, the surviving documents provided damaging evidence of bribery payments of £30–40,000 that had facilitated Joitabaee’s dispossession. One memorandum was drawn up by Nafra also implicated former acting Resident of Baroda W. C. Andrews, who apparently “died, suffering from, if not killed by, the anxiety following” its discovery.31 After these revelations, Outram pressured the gaekwar to appoint a second panchayat, which found that Nafra was complicit in the abduction and death of Joitabaee’s son. His punishment was a fine of 15,500 rupees and seven years’ imprisonment. While Outram was combing through the bank’s papers to determine the extent of the fraud, he also discovered that Nafra had placed £8,000 at the disposal of an intermediary named Joteshwur for the purpose of bribing Reid.32 While Joteshwur did not approach Reid directly, he did leave the money with R. D. Craig, a mixed-race clerk in the Secretary’s Office who absconded to Calcutta thereafter. The hierarchy in Bombay was quite willing to portray Craig as the corrupted villain of the piece,

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but Outram was not convinced that khutput was limited to the lower rung of the bureaucracy.33 In his private correspondence, he clarified that he was contending with a “foul system of bribery and corruption which has so long prevailed at this petty durbar, and indeed in every British office throughout Government”.34 He felt he had received “no support from the Bombay govt, every member of which is supposed by the natives to be as corrupt as themselves”. The documents recovered from Huree Bhugtee further indicated that Nafra had bribed Nursoo Punt with a payment of 78,000 rupees (£6,500) in 1848. Bombay therefore approved Outram’s request to stage an inquiry into Nursoo’s conduct before a special commission in accordance with the new Public Servants Act (XXXVII of 1850).35 Charged with seven crimes, Nursoo in the end was only found guilty of betraying the Resident’s trust and making “ill use of Reid’s name” to boast of his favoured status; he was dismissed from service and barred from future employment under the Company. This was, then, only a minor victory for Outram, who had been unfamiliar with the procedures of the civil adalat courts (which the tribunal employed) and had been precluded from presenting his own testimony as evidence. Undeterred, Outram urged Bombay to confirm Nafra’s criminal sentence and produced an expansive and inflammatory khutput report in November 1851 that resembled “an awful recapitulation—a sort of Doomsday catalogue of crimes unexpiated”.36 But just as his triumph over the Nagurs seemed imminent, Outram was dismissed. The Bombay Guardian reported that this was his “reward for being too honest for a British Resident at a Native Court, and for wishing to put inquiries into the corrupt practices of the Baroda Durbar to an extent that might prove inconvenient to the fosterers of the khutput system”.37 Outram only managed to obtain some resolution to this saga when, following his re-appointment in 1854 at the insistence of the Court of Directors in London, he secured the dismissal of the gaekwar’s chief minister, Bhow Tambekur, who had protected the Nagurs and had engaged in bribery himself.38

The Bapat Commission The Bapat case in 1894–1895 was no less remarkable, given that Baroda was considered by then to be a “model state” of European influence. Bapat’s alleged corruption occurred in the Alienation Department which

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was a product of the reformed state’s long-running campaign for fiscal viability. When Sayajirao was still a child, minister Madhava Rao had made a concerted effort “to enforce economy in expenditure, to restrain waste, to reduce extravagance, and to prevent losses arising from corruption and malversation”.39 To further streamline property-holding and revenue collection in the early 1890s, Sayajirao attempted to replicate the Bombay Hereditary Offices Act and regulate the possession of vatans, or hereditary claims “to perform a particular kind of labor and receive certain payments and perquisites”.40 His new rules, however, “gave rise to discontent and agitation” throughout Baroda.41 The origins of this illfeeling could be traced back to the gaekwar’s former tutor, Elliot, who supervised the division of vatans and determined disputes between their holders in a way that brooked no challenge to his decisions. The prosecution in the Bapat case would claim that the accused had acted in a similarly arbitrary manner in Elliot’s absence, widely accepting bribes from inamdars who were keen to safeguard their tax-free property holdings from confiscation. After reading an account of rampant corruption under Elliot’s watch in the Ahmedabad Times, Colonel Biddulph appointed A. F. Maconochie of the Settlement Department to gather evidentiary materials via a Special Commission (in keeping with the terms of Act XXXVII of 1850). It would be tempting to approach this Commission as a simple attempt to smear the gaekwar—one scholarly descendant of Sayajirao has done just that.42 However, both English and vernacular newspapers throughout India represented the four-month trial as a legitimate inquiry into the operations of a controversial bureaucratic entity.43 A sizeable crowd attended the first meeting of the Bapat Commission in late September of 1894 to watch a clash between two heavyweights in the legal field. Former Indian National Congress President Pherozeshah Mehta led the prosecution, while Bapat’s defence team included luminaries such as B. G. Tilak. Bapat initially faced thirty-five charges of bribery, as many disgruntled inamdars who had acceded to his demands testified to a clear pattern of extortion in the Alienation Department. These property holders had “received messages to settle with Bapat” if they wished to resolve lingering boundary disputes in their favour; if they refused, the cases were suddenly “taken up and adversely decided”.44 At that point, Bapat would demand bribes ranging from 1,200 to 10,000 rupees. Having served Bapat in various capacities over fourteen years, the banker Girdharlal emerged as the prosecution’s star witness during two

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weeks of questioning. While Bapat alternately insisted that he did not keep regular books and that his personal papers were unobtainable, Girdharlal showed the court the receipts in the form of “benami accounts, a species of book-keeping well known in India”.45 To conceal his acceptance of bribes and their conveyance to Bapat, he recorded these dealings in his ledgers as payments to a number of fictitious personages. The prosecution also made quick work of Bapat’s objection that he could not be accused of corruption if the bribers were unsuccessful in their cases. Looking to the Indian Penal Code for guidance, they noted that “a person receiving a bribe under pretense of doing what he does not really intend to do” was equally punishable under the terms of Section 161.46 When his defence’s legal manoeuverings foundered, Bapat fell back on the argument that the Commission was “the outcome of a vast conspiracy originated and organized in the Residency”. Although this allegation was not completely unfounded, the prosecution at the time diagnosed Bapat with a persecution complex. Mr. Branson, who had taken over for Mehta, could hardly imagine “that the seventy or eighty witnesses called were perjured up to their eyes to the knowledge of high officials, supported by fabricated evidence, the witnesses having been tutored, bribed, threatened … into giving false evidence” all for the “villainous purpose of procuring the corrupt judicial destruction of an absolutely innocent man”.47 Noting that Bapat himself had been aware of widespread rumours that “no business could be done in his department without money”, Branson surmised that there was “no smoke without fire”.48 It took the Commission four months to assemble its final report and find Bapat “guilty in respect of eleven of the twelve charges of receiving bribes”.49 The gaekwar mulled the case over until October, at which point he determined that Bapat was “freed of the charges” while simultaneously calling for his dismissal. This decision took many aback, as did the fact that he had relied on the counsel of newly appointed Naib Dewan Mr. Pandit—a partisan Maratha who had been excluded from the Commission on account of his blatant pro-Bapat sympathies. Effectively acquitting Bapat, the gaekwar seemingly accepted the defence’s unsubstantiated argument that the Residency had “got up” the case and fabricated evidence. Fearing a public relations nightmare, Maconochie fumed that “no British officer should sit quiet under such a monstrous imputation”.50 And yet, he attempted to take the higher ground and remained silent while “all Gujurat” boiled “with indignation at the Gaekwar’s interference with justice”.51

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Politicizing Corruption What, then, can we conclude from these two cases? The first point is that the British authorities responded very differently to allegations of corruption and that political considerations determined both what constituted corruption and whether or not to prosecute it. The khutput debacle shows that the EIC either refused to investigate and punish behaviour that Outram drew to its attention as corrupt, or implemented penalties so mild as to be meaningless (except against Outram himself). In the Bapat scandal, on the other hand, British authorities seemed very keen to push a commission of enquiry and to prosecute. Yet these different responses to allegations of corruption were both geared towards maintaining or even extending British power. In obstructing Outram’s inquiries, the Bombay government wished to retain the system of guarantees that gave them a foothold in Baroda’s internal politics and suppressed the revelation of khutput to ensure its continuance. In the early 1890s, Biddulph and his colleagues began to resent Elliot for wielding undue influence over Sayajirao and enabling his ill-considered reforms. They mistakenly anticipated that an investigation into Bapat’s corrupt deal-making in Elliot’s Alienation Department would humble the gaekwar and remind him of his subordinate position in the colonial feudal order. One of Outram’s defenders pithily summarized the different options available in the face of systemic corruption: Where a habit of dishonesty of any kind prevails, two courses are open in respect of it: 1st, to resist and expose it whenever it affects our own interests or proceedings; or, 2ndly, to bear with it, satisfied with the total result, although that result be diminished by this adverse influence.52

Outram had taken the first; the Bombay government had taken the second. In an official minute, Governor Falkland claimed that Outram was jeopardizing good relations with the gaekwar and was being manipulated by natives who were “seeking to turn his monomania to advantage in the attainment of their own ends”.53 He further determined that Outram lacked the “tact, calmness of mind and discretion indispensable to the maintenance, on a satisfactory footing, of our political relations with the Baroda Government” and berated him for thinking that his post gave him “some independent authority of his own”. Falkland therefore declared that the Resident was

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not placed at Baroda as a governing power, nor is it consistent with his duty to interfere with the actual Government of the country, further than by exercising a personal influence, which may enable him, without direct and visible interference, to sway the councils of the Durbar for the benefit of the people and the interests of the British power which he represents.54

This statement, however, was somewhat disingenuous given the indirect power that the EIC itself continued to wield over the gaekwar. Unsettled by Outram’s dogged advocacy of Joitabaee’s cause, Bombay Council members preferred to avoid a scenario in which “every appeal to the Resident … by a guaranteed subject, will be viewed as an act of rebellion against his lawful prince”.55 And yet, they refused to materially alter the bhandari system that undergirded their influence and denied that guaranteed individuals such as Nafra were flouting the law with abandon. Reid even advised against cancelling Huree Bhugtee’s bhandari, noting that “commercial morality” was simply at “not so high a standard among our countrymen in India”.56 This same concern to preserve and extend colonial power would provide the impetus for the formation of the Bapat Commission in 1894. Whereas the Bombay Council in the 1850s looked upon the guarantees as a necessary evil to keep the gaekwars in line, later administrations boldly experimented with reforming the court’s culture and refashioning the Baroda bureaucracy. Under Elliot’s tutelage, Sayajirao developed a passion for improvements such as educational and infrastructural projects; tours throughout Europe further expanded his horizons, leading him to borrow “expressed and implied ideas” that would “mould modern Baroda”.57 This construction of a “model state” that was partially but not entirely Western in appearance began to provoke uneasiness among the colonial policymakers who had initially approved of such experiments.58 As princely administrations were “universally extolled in the Native Press as a sample of the best form of Home Rule”, agents in the Indian Foreign Department also feared they might testify to the obsolescence of the colonial presence. They were therefore adamant that these success stories “owe[d] all their distinctive features to the recent application of British methods of British officers to the states”.59 Even the secretary of state for India publicly confirmed that “governments have always hated and discouraged independent and original talent…and promoted docile and unpretending mediocrity”.60 It was this official mindset that soured relations between the gaekwar and the Residency in the mid-1890s. Biddulph

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bridled at Sayajirao’s presumption “that the Baroda State [was] practically equal with the British government”; such thinking implied that the colonial state had “no more right to interfere in the affairs of Baroda than…in the affairs of Denmark or Portugal”.61 This resentment was apparently mutual, as the gaekwar was reportedly “discontented” and felt “aggrieved especially by the present Resident” who regarded his “actions, administrative measures, and motives” with suspicion. Biddulph was convinced that Elliot had encouraged the gaekwar to adopt an absolutist, territorial conceptualization of sovereignty that militated against the Residency’s supervision. Sayajirao’s unorthodox decision to retain his former tutor had been controversial since the outset, as the Government of India thought “it would never do to have an irresponsible English adviser practically ruling Baroda over the heads of the Dewan and Council”.62 Those authorities relented in 1883 after the gaekwar offered to provide Elliot “more legitimate occupation” in the Revenue Department. By 1891, the latter had expanded his portfolio and was authorized “to supervise all State Departments and see if the orders issued from time to time were carried out, and to submit reports on all departments after his inspection”.63 Meanwhile, Biddulph had become convinced that he would be “unable to exert his own personal influence over His Highness” and attempt any rapprochement so long as Elliot continued to have Sayajirao’s ear.64 The Resident later claimed that he had made Elliot aware of rumours that the Alienation Department was awash in corruption and bribery; he even recalled that Elliot had received an anonymous petition warning him not to fall under “the evil influence” of Bapat.65 The Bapat Commission’s findings thus supported the Residency’s political objective to undermine Elliot’s influence and ward off challenges to its own. For Biddulph, it was readily apparent that Elliot had “given protection and immunity to a vast system of organized corruption that would never have reached the proportions it did but for the attitude taken up by him”.66 But the new Resident, Colonel N. C. Martelli, implied that his predecessor’s attempt to reassert colonial paramountcy had gone too far. It was one thing to put self-directing princes in their place and quite another to undermine the model state experiment altogether. Because Biddulph had kicked a hornet’s nest, Martelli was forced to reckon with the reality that the “the administration under the cloaks of codes, law, regulations, and high-paid officials” was “anything but sound”.67

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In both of the cases under examination, officials’ differing political agendas resulted in incongruous conceptions of what actually constituted corruption and which malpractices demanded intervention. The Bombay authorities, for instance, charged Outram with tilting at windmills and portrayed khutput as a quotidian behaviour that the colonial power could hardly rectify. For Governor Falkland, what was termed khutput was “inseparable in the ideas of an Asiatic from the possession of power which he believes to be absolute”.68 Under despotic rule, intelligent Indians would naturally attempt to sway a monarch by influencing those who surrounded him rather than trusting “to the abstract justice of their cause”. And because such techniques yielded dividends in Baroda, the khutputists logically presumed they would work in Bombay as well. Falkland implied that Outram was peculiarly deluded if he believed he could single-handedly induce the inhabitants of Baroda “to disbelieve the efficacy of khutput all over the world”. In his personal rebuttal to Outram, Reid also pointed to “the total absence of even the semblance of political morality in the Baroda court”.69 The comportment of the bribers in Baroda was not immoral but rather amoral. Khutput was simply a means to an end rather than the violation of a supreme behavioural code. For Outram, however, khutput represented corruption pure and simple. Yet he claimed that he “never entertained a Quixotic design of rooting out corruption from amongst the natives of India”.70 Instead, he hoped “to be supported by Government, in showing that high British functionaries were incorruptible”—so much the better to preserve the empire. The “vindication of the purity of the British name” was thus essential to strengthening and legitimizing colonial rule.71 Sincere and energetic in what he called his “crusade against corruption”,72 he nevertheless sought to root out bribery and undue influence over his British colleagues in order to vindicate and legitimize British influence. Outram and Bombay had similar imperial aims but different ways of achieving them, different views of where the danger of corruption lay, and different ideas about whether some forms of corruption could be tolerated. Officials in the 1890s favoured varying anti-corruption measures depending on whether they considered Sayajirao to be a belligerent monarch or a sympathetic, unsuspecting victim who required colonial assistance.73 Such help was potentially warranted due to the malign influence of Elliot’s estranged wife, who was a close confidant of the Maharani

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Gajra Bai. While Biddulph was mainly perturbed that Mrs. Elliot was receiving an unauthorized stipend as a member of the royal entourage and sought to discourage this practice,74 Captain W. Evans-Gordon—who supervised the gaekwar’s European sojourn in 1894—was rather more concerned that she was conspiring to send Sayajirao to an early grave by misdirecting the tour and circulating rumours of his infirmity. If Gajra Bai was appointed regent upon her husband’s demise, Mrs. Elliot would surely benefit from this reshuffle.75 As the Bapat Commission was finalizing its report in May of 1895, Evans-Gordon was doggedly reminding his superiors that Mrs. Elliot was a “thoroughly dangerous intriguing woman, whose unscrupulousness it is impossible to exaggerate”.76 The British were thus deeply divided among themselves.

Publicizing Corruption Both the khutput and Bapat scandals escaped the control of the authorities and quickly became matters of public debate. Metropolitan reformers seized upon the Outram drama as damning evidence that the provincial government in India operated as an imperium in imperio with scant accountability. In 1852, a handful of MPs were dissatisfied with the manner in which Company rule would be scrutinized during the charter renewal debates; few natives, they feared, would brave the journey to present testimony before Parliament. News of Outram’s dismissal further “illuminated the dark recesses of Indian despotism and corruption”, thereby revealing the necessity of a local commission to examine Bombay’s conduct “at the scene of their action”.77 E. H. Colebrooke drew an analogy between the practice of khutput and the archaic patronage system that continued to enrich each director to the tune of £17,000 annually.78 In its place, the MPs called for the introduction of competitive exams that would be open to native aspirants. For the Company’s leadership, this debacle was a source of unmitigated embarrassment. In parliamentary debates, director James Hogg had rejected the notion that any officers “high in the service of the Bombay government … had ever been convicted of corruption, or had ever had it imputed to them”.79 But he was forced to admit that “malpractices…among the subordinate functionaries in the government offices” had “been

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continued through many years”.80 In official correspondence—which Parliament ordered to be submitted to it and then printed—the directors admonished Bombay for allowing this culture of corruption to take root. If the provincial government had any inkling that illicit transactions were taking place in a department but could not identify the perpetrators, they would be justified in dismissing the entire staff.81 Hogg’s claim that no high-ranking official had been accused of corruption would not hold up for long. Whereas Outram had taken pains to avoid personal attacks against his confederates, an author writing under the pseudonym “Indus” published a series of letters in the Daily News that boldly implicated Reid in the khutput ring. These appeared as a pamphlet in 1852, which went through four editions in less than a year. Glorifying Outram, its author, “Indus”, claimed that the former Resident was more than once targeted by the gaekwar’s poisoners; even after his withdrawal, “sacrifices of goats and sheep” were “carried on, at the order of the Guicowar, in order to effect [his] death”.82 Indus further noted that Reid’s name often appeared in governmental proceedings as “opposed to inquiry, where opposition is possible; or, at least, where that cannot be evaded, as opposed to severity in chastisement”.83 As a result of this lenience, the Baroda durbar continued to believe that “gold can effect anything with the English sarkar”. Once the 1,514-page parliamentary Blue Books on the Baba Nafra case emerged in 1853,84 Outram received further support in reformist circles. John Chapman, the former promoter of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway who had taken to writing pieces of imperial critique, cast him as a chivalrous defender of Joitabaee’s honour and upbraided Bombay for requiring positive proofs that the deceased child was hers by blood.85 Recapitulating Outram’s career from his Mahee Kanta days to the present, Chapman found it impossible that a person at Baroda should come to any other conclusion than that the open boast of the corruptionists was substantially true, viz. that secret influence at the seat of [British] Government was the real means of impunity to the evil-doers, and of disappointment, disgust, and in some cases ruin, to those who attempted to check them.86

Reid, who was canvassing Company proprietors for election to the directorate, did not help his cause by publishing a rather unconvincing

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rebuttal. Apart from denouncing Indus as a libeler, he attempted to redeem disgraced minister Nursoo Punt and noted that Outram himself had been targeted by bribers in the past.87 In a heated rejoinder, Outram insisted that there was an obvious distinction between his comportment and Reid’s. While khutput was certainly pervasive, Outram and other upright officers had notified the authorities immediately upon learning that they were likely targets. Reid, in contrast, had ignored the matter altogether until Indus connected the dots in the Daily News. Outram also declared that the Bombay Council’s resistance to his inquires had “tended to rivet more powerfully than ever, in the native community of Baroda, the belief that certain influential and wealthy criminals…enjoyed the secret favour, sympathy, and support of those in power”.88 Mystified by his adversary’s unwavering loyalty to Nursoo, Outram predicted that a translation of Reid’s recent pamphlet into Gujarati would “do more to convince the natives of Baroda of the ‘efficacy of Khutput,’ than fifty years will suffice to undo”.89 Other critics also noted the inherent hypocrisy of Reid’s position. A decade earlier during the Dadajee affair, Reid had himself admitted that “the greatest evil next to the actual prevalence of corruption, is the dissemination of this belief among the masses of the population that it does exist, for the effects in both cases are nearly the same”.90 While the Bapat case did not attract such attention in the metropole, it created waves in western India by exposing latent ethnic strife between the Gujarati and Maratha communities. The fact that the three-man Commission was entirely composed of Gujaratis (despite the gaekwar’s wishes to the contrary) stoked a “great violence of feeling…among the Mahrattas of Bombay, Poona, and Baroda, who made it into a race quarrel”.91 As a result, the prosecution apparently contended with all forms of intimidation. After a “murderous attack was made on a witness”, both Maconochie and those testifying “were obliged to take special precautions for their own safety”. When the gaekwar returned from his European sojourn in the late winter, he further stoked these tensions by replacing the officers who assisted the prosecution with Maratha civil servants. Native editorialists wrote to the Times of India to debate the significance of these politicized transfers. While an anonymous “Mahratta” assured readers that “the present shuffling of offices had nothing peculiar in it except in the eyes of jaundiced observers”, sceptics warned that enlightened statecraft was incompatible with personal partiality.92 By July, papers throughout India were reporting that the Bapat investigation “was

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regarded by all classes in the Native State of Baroda as a struggle between the Guzerathis and the Mahrattas”.93 The gaekwars’ surprise rejection of the Commission’s recommendations was a shocking development that provoked a good deal of discussion. The Times of India reported that Sayajirao had instructed several partisan, pro-Bapat Maratha officials to review the case and had based his decision on “ex parte information and representations” rather than “sworn evidence laid before the Commission”.94 Lacking access to the Commission’s report, the Times of India also struggled to make sense of the gaekwar’s verdict from a legal perspective. It was unclear what the phrase “freed of charges” signified and how this finding differed from an acquittal.95 While the Times urged the gaekwar to ensure “what used to be gained by violence is not now gained by craft”, the native papers adopted a patently critical tone.96 A writer for the Kaiser-i-Hind thought that a wave of ministerial retirements and resignations suggested that the native states were “more or less out of administrative gear, if not radically rotten to the core”.97 Rast Goftar, an organ of Bombay’s Parsi community, declared that the entire appointment of the Bapat Commission was merely a “Gaekwari farce” that had squandered a vast amount of time and money. Other papers were “of the opinion that the proverbial Gaekwari mismanagement of old seems to have broken out with renewed vigour”.98 Predictably, presses that expressed the opinions of the Maratha community rejected these censures and dismissed the Commission as the work of anti-patriotic partisans who thought of “themselves as Gujaratis and Deccanis instead of considering themselves as servants of the State”.99 The Bapat affair thus publicly exposed significant tensions within Baroda.

Conclusion The Baroda cases highlight that corruption was deeply politicized in imperial contexts where authorities confronted challenges of exercising power over peoples with different cultures. The British did so through agents far removed from the metropole, leaving a good deal of policy and discretion to men who, as Outram’s battle with Falkland or Biddulph’s with the Elliots underline, did not always see eye to eye. Political context, rather than a universal set of moral principles, informed how these parties reacted to the occurrence of bribery and corruption. It is significant that Outram’s clash with his superiors in Bombay was replicated within the EIC in London after he appealed to the Court of Directors about

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his dismissal. In an “iniquitous and incoherent” judgement on 26 June 1852, the Court sat on the fence: they condemned Outram’s disrespectful language to his superiors and confirmed his removal, but also supported his zeal against corruption and hoped that he could be found another post in India.100 Perhaps as many as 18 of the 23 directors dissented from this ambiguous stance, setting out their belief that Outram’s work required support, not censure.101 The Company, then, was divided both at home and abroad. But the politicization of corruption meant more than internal divisions and differences of opinion among Britons. It also indicated that the meaning of corruption, where it principally lay, and what (if anything) should be done about it, were all topics of debate. Subject to criticism in the metropolitan press, in Parliament, and in the increasingly assertive Indian papers, colonial authorities often struggled to control the public response to corruption allegations. The relationship between the press and imperial corruption, or between imperial authorities and the “public”, has been highlighted in a number of recent works on Cape Colony.102 Questions of how information concerning corruption leaked, was disseminated for different audiences, and resonated across both the metropole and colonies all have wider global implications and provide fertile ground for further research. The two cases presented in this chapter also highlight broader issues concerning Britons’ control over regions or states that were not formal colonies. This was not an intrinsically modern problem. Aside from the EIC, other corporations in the pre-modern era sought to use sociocultural as well as commercial and political influence that also provoked corruption allegations.103 Corruption was thus not merely about the abuse of office, but also about patronage, influence, networks, and gifting cultures through which informal power often worked and which were frequently connected to larger power dynamics.104 These socioeconomic-cultural relationships lay on the shifting, uncertain, and highly charged boundary between licit and illicit behaviour that was in part shaped by public reactions to corruption scandals. The type of discussions that the Baroda cases generated in the local and imperial presses, as well as in Parliament, may be observed more widely across a global canvass to highlight the importance of a deliberative element in determining norms.105 Although scholars such as Lauren Benton have identified the “outright suspension of law” as a key feature of “systems of divided sovereignty”,

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the corruption cases that we have recovered were clearly ensconced in distinct but occasionally overlapping judicial orders.106 Such legal ambiguity created significant problems. In probing the misconduct of Nursoo Punt, Baba Nafra, and Vasudev Bapat, colonial officials negotiated a labyrinth of legal pluralism. As a Company servant, Nursoo was brought up on charges under Act XXXVII of 1850; the fate of Baba Nafra was left to the successive panchayats that the gaekwar convened (at the request of the Residency). The Bapat Commission, meanwhile, was a hybrid operation in which Sayajirao adopted—and later overrode—British procedures. Both the prosecution and defence made frequent references to colonial civil and criminal codes throughout the proceedings. Historians have recently gravitated towards cases in which native rulers rejected European extraterritoriality as a violation of their internal sovereignty.107 Yet we should not neglect instances in which subordinate states partially or fully adopted legal frameworks borrowed from paramount regimes. If the adoption of colonial law in regions under indirect rule signalled a kind of symbolic victory for the British, the improper application of these codes could be interpreted as a galling counter-hegemonic affront. These juridical contests deserve further scrutiny on a global scale. Although the politicization of anti-corruption was universal across time and space, it was particularly acute in imperial settings (as chapters by Gemma Rubi and Ronald Kroeze also suggest). Corruption scandals were directly implicated in politics in that they provided triggers for regime changes; were shaped and exploited by political groups for their own advantage; and, as Xavier Huetz de Lemps’ chapter illustrates for the Philippines, left long-term political legacies. Scholars writing in other contexts have also approached corruption as a means of propping up regimes or systems, as much as lining individual pockets. Studies suggest that anti-corruption “clean-ups are important political phenomena” and that new heads of state and incumbent governments continue to use reform to gain political advantage over opponents.108 Our analysis of colonial-gaekwari relations demonstrates that the invocation or denial of corruption—as well as its definition—were all political interventions, but the point is more generally applicable. The language of corruption was used against rivals to achieve political goals, even if those doing so fell victim themselves to the same rhetoric.109 As each side weaponized anti-corruption it could thus lead to thin politics and erode trust in the political and judicial process altogether.110 Scholars studying countries in transition have seen corruption as a discourse worthy of analysis and asked

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very useful questions about what political work the language of corruption does (what it enables and what it excludes); what or who determines the meaning(s) of corruption at any given moment; and how a focus on particular types of individual or institutional corruption can miss wider systemic corruption.111 From this point of view, corruption becomes less an essentialist “thing” as a lens through which to view wider political and societal tensions and contests, an approach that is useful to the historian as well as the social scientist.

Notes 1. Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 297. 2. Outram defined khutput as “illicit influence over high Bombay functionaries”. See James Outram, Baroda Intrigues and Bombay Khutput, an Exposition of the Fallacies Promulgated by Mr. Lestock Robert Reid in a “Letter to the editor of The Daily News” (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1853), 138. Other commentators simply translated it as ‘corruption’. See Indus, Bombay Briberies; A Tale of the Present Charter (London: Effingham Wilson, 1853), 4–5. 3. David Hardiman, “Baroda: The Structure of a Progressive State,” in People, Princes and Paramount Power. Society and Politics in the Indian Princely States, ed. Robin Jeffrey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978). 4. Stanley Rice, Life of Sayaji Rao III, Maharaja of Baroda (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 28. 5. Michael Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764–1858 (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 66. 6. Zak Leonard, “Law of Nations Theory and the Native Sovereignty Debates in Colonial India,” Law and History Review 38, no. 2 (2020): 374–407; Priyasha Saksena, “Jousting Over Jurisdiction: Sovereignty and International Law in Late Nineteenth-Century South Asia,” Law and History Review 38, no. 2 (2020): 409–457. 7. Saksena, “Jousting over Jurisdiction,” 416. 8. Michael Cowen, Doctrines of Development (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 74. For disputes over corruption in Britain before 1850, see Mark Knights, Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire, 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 9. In prosecuting former Governor-General Warren Hastings, Edmund Burke contended that the distinction between legitimate gift-giving and bribes was readily apparent in the Persian language. See Vinod

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10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

Pavarala, “Cultures of Corruption and the Corruption of Culture: the East India Company and the Hastings Impeachment,” in Corrupt Histories, eds. Emmanuel Kreike and William Chester Jordan (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004), 313–315. See also Katherine Prior, Lance Brennan, and Robin Haines, “Bad Language: the Role of English, Persian and Other Esoteric Tongues in the Dismissal of Sir Edward Colebrooke as Resident of Delhi in 1829,” Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 1 (2001): 105; Margot Finn, “Material Turns in British History: II. Corruption: Imperial Power, Princely Politics and Gifts Gone Rogue,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 29 (2019): 1–25; Knights, Trust and Distrust (Oxford, forthcoming), chapter 2. Knut Auckland, “Connecting British and Indian, Elite and Subaltern: Arthur Crawford and Corruption in the Later Nineteenth Century Western India,” South Asian History and Culture 4, no. 3 (2013): 323. William Gould, Bureaucracy, Community, and Influence in India: Society and the State, 1930s –1960s (New York: Routledge, 2011), 82–86. “‘The Times’ on the Crawford Case,” Madras Mail, July 26, 1889, 6. The Times, June 29, 1889. Callie Wilkinson, “Weak Ties in a Tangled Web? Relationships between the Political Residents of the English East India Company and their Munshis, 1798–1818,” Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 5 (2019): 1598. Indus, Bombay Briberies, 2. John Chapman, Baroda and Bombay; Their Political Morality (London: John Chapman, 1853), 11–15. Ibid., 15. F. J. Goldsmid, James Outram: A Biography, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1880), 22. S. V. Kothekar, The Gaikwads of Baroda and the East India Company, 1770–1820 (Nagpur: Nagpur University, 1977), 95. East India, 1853. Return of the Subjects of His Highness the Guicowar Now Enjoying the British Guarantee (HC, 883), 39. Other colonial agents worried that the British could not “support the usurious and grasping speculations of the loan contractors of India, without raising them into political influence, and without gaining the reputation of being [themselves] governed by sordid and unworthy motives”. See John Sutherland, Sketches of the Relations Subsisting between the British Government in India, and the Different Native States (Calcutta: G. H. Huttman, 1837), 97. F. A. H. Elliot, The Rulers of Baroda (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1879), 99. Return of the Subjects of His Highness the Guicowar, 63. See also Mani Kamerkar, British Paramountcy: British-Baroda Relations, 1818–1848 (Bombay: Popular, 1980), 124.

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25. After the gaekwar dismissed Dadajee from service for embezzlement, the Court of Directors intervened and restored his tax-free holdings that had been confiscated as punishment. For a synopsis of this affair, see Government of Bombay to the Court of Directors, May 1, 1843, British Library (BL), IOR/F/4/2034/92,213, ff. 41–57. It was later alleged that the gaekwar had provided Dhackjee with 60,000 rupees to bribe Reid. See Indus, Bombay Briberies, 25. 26. Copies of all Correspondence and Papers on the Subject of Colonel Outram’s Removal from the Office of Resident at the Court of the Guicowar, or on the Subject on the Alleged Corruption of Officers of the Bombay Government with Bribes from Baroda (HC, 560), 413. 27. Return of the subjects of His Highness the Guicowar, 5–6. 28. Indus, Bombay Briberies, 39. 29. Copies of all Correspondence and Papers, 382. 30. The gaekwar had perhaps been alienated by Baba Nafra’s mismanagement and plundering of the bank—he was said to have taken £70,000 in jewels and £50,000 in money from its treasure chests. See Chapman, Baroda and Bombay, 99. 31. Ibid., 73, 140. 32. Ibid., 63. 33. Outram, Baroda Intrigues, 120. Outram suspected that Craig’s disappearance had resulted from the “exposure of his relations with his sister-in-law, with whom he had been conducting adulterous intercourse”. 34. James Outram to John Jacob, December 29, 1850, BL, Mss Eur F75/3. 35. Copies of all Correspondence and Papers, 1011–1017. 36. Indus, Bombay Briberies, 72. 37. Bombay Guardian, January 23, 1852. Cited in J. R. B. Jeejeebhoy, Bribery and Corruption in Bombay (Bombay: Sanj Vartaman Press, 1952), 194. 38. Goldsmid, Outram, 73, 84; Chapman, Baroda and Bombay, 132. 39. Rice, Life of Sayaji Rao III, 24. 40. Rachel Sturman, The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law, and Women’s Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 98–99. A vatandar might be tasked with tax collection or else ensure the maintenance of village records. This role rotated between male family members until the 1874 Watan Act endowed the eldest male with sole power. 41. Kaiser-i-Hind, February 18, 1894. 42. Fatesinhrao Gaekwad, Sayajirao of Baroda, the Prince and the Man (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1989), 159–164. 43. “The Alleged Bribery at Baroda, First Day of the Commission,” The Times of India, September 26, 1894, 5.

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44. “The Baroda Commission,” The Times of India, October 2, 1894, 5. 45. “The Bapat Case,” The Times of India, October 14, 1894, 4; “The Baroda Commission,” The Times of India, January 18, 1895, 5. 46. “The Baroda Commission of Enquiry. The Final Speech for the Prosecution,” The Times of India, January 18, 1895, 6. 47. “The Baroda Commission,” The Times of India, January 16, 1895, 5. 48. “The Baroda Commission,” The Times of India, January 22, 1895, 5. 49. Lahore Tribune, June 1, 1895, 1. 50. A. F. Maconochie to W. J. Cunningham, October 16, 1895, BL, IOR/R/1/1/162, f. 15. 51. Ibid., October 25, 1895. 52. Chapman, Baroda and Bombay, 124–125. 53. Ibid., 116–117. 54. Ibid., 129. 55. Copies of all Correspondence and Papers, 402, 406. 56. Return of the Subjects of His Highness the Guicowar, 46–47. 57. Rice, Life of Sayaji Rao III , 83. 58. Manu Bhagavan, “Demystifying the ‘Ideal Progressive’: Resistance through Mimicked Modernity in Princely Baroda, 1900–1913,” Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (2001): 386. 59. William Lee-Warner, The Protected Princes of India (London: Macmillan and Co., 1894), 124. 60. Sir John Gorst, Speech to House of Commons, June 16, 1891, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 3rd series., vol. 354 (1891) col. 567. 61. Gaekwad, Sayajirao of Baroda, 171. 62. “Memorandum of Mr. Elliot’s connection with Baroda,” BL, IOR/R/1/1/162, f. 11. See also ‘Appointment of Mr. F. A. H. Elliot as Supt. Of Revenue Survey and Settlement of Baroda State,’ National Archives of India, Bombay: Foreign, 1883–06, nos. 216/224. 63. J. Biddulph to W. J. Cunningham, February 20, 1895, BL, IOR/R/1/1/162, f. 8. 64. Ibid., f. 5. 65. Ibid., ff. 2–3. 66. “Report of Colonel Biddulph,” BL, IOR/R/1/1/162, f. 4. 67. N. C. Martelli to W. J. Cunningham, May 29, 1895, BL, IOR/R/1/1/162, f. 7. 68. Copies of all Correspondence and Papers, 400–402, 1284. 69. Lestock Reid, Letter to the Editor of the ‘Daily News’ (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1853), 64. 70. Chapman, Baroda and Bombay, 119. 71. Ibid, 122. See also Ronald Kroeze’s chapter in this volume. 72. Goldsmid, Outram, 52.

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73. W. Evans-Gordon to W. J. Cunningham, February 1, 1894, BL, IOR/R/1/1/140. 74. “K. W. No. 1: Employment of Mrs. F. A.H. Elliot by the Gaekwar, while in Europe, not sanctioned,” BL, IOR/R/1/1/140; J. Biddulph to W. J. Cunningham, July 26, 1894, BL, IOR/R/1/1/140. 75. W. Evans-Gordon to W. J. Cunningham, May 16, 1894, BL, IOR/R/1/1/140, ff. 3–4. 76. W. Evans-Gordon to Neel, May 14, 1895, BL, IOR/R/1/1/140, f. 2. 77. Chisholm Anstey, Speech to House of Commons, April 19, 1852, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 3rd series., vol. 120 (1852), col. 830. 78. Edward Colebrooke, Speech to House of Commons, April 19, 1852, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 3rd series., vol. 120 (1852), col. 843. 79. Sir James Hogg, Speech to House of Commons, April 27, 1852, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 3rd series., vol. 120 (1852), col. 1387. 80. Indus, Bombay Briberies, 83. 81. Copies of all Correspondence and Papers, 20. For additional printed material see Colonel Outram. Return to an Order of the Honourable House of Commons (1852). 82. Indus, Bombay Briberies, 82. 83. Ibid., 26, 81. 84. Even Outram thought there was too much material for the public to really take it in. See Goldsmid, Outram, 71. For an account of Outram’s previous whistleblowing, see Sarah Ansari, “The Sind Blue Books of 1843 and 1844: The Political ‘Laundering’ of Historical Evidence,” The English Historical Review 120, no. 485 (2005): 35–65. 85. Chapman, Baroda and Bombay, 111. 86. Ibid., 19. Chapman received accolades for his coverage of the Outram case from John Dickinson, who invited him to join his India Reform Society. See John Chapman to Jagannath Sunkersett, April 8, 1853, BL, Mss Eur E234/100. 87. Reid, Letter to the Editor, 22–28. 88. Outram, Baroda Intrigues, 12. 89. Ibid., 148. 90. Lestock Reid to the Court of Directors, June 19, 1843, BL, IOR/F/4/2034/92,213, f. 62. 91. J. Biddulph to W. J. Cunningham, February 20, 1895, BL, IOR/R/1/1/162, f. 1. 92. A Mahratta, “Baroda Affairs,” The Times of India, July 4, 1895, 5; Onlooker, “Baroda Affairs,” The Times of India, July 6, 1895, 5. 93. “Baroda Affairs,” Pioneer, July 18, 1895, 2.

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94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104.

105.

106.

107.

108.

109.

“The Bapat Case,” The Times of India, October 5, 1895, 4. “The Bapat Case,” The Times of India, October 14, 1895, 4. “The Bapat Case,” The Times of India, October 18, 1895, 4. “The Native Papers,” The Times of India, October 10, 1895, 6. “The Native Papers,” The Times of India, October 19, 1895, 3. Ibid. Indus, Bombay Briberies, 66. Indus also chastised the Court of Directors for their failure to intervene earlier. Goldsmid, Outram, 68–70. Zoe Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815–1845: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); Kirsten McKenzie, Imperial Underworld: An Escaped Convict and the Transformation of the British Colonial Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Knights, Trust and Distrust. David Veevers, “‘Inhabitants of the Universe’: Global Families, Kinship Networks, and the Formation of the Early Modern Colonial State in Asia,” Journal of Global History 10 (2015): 99–121. Ben Gilding, “The Rise and Fall of Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (1780– 1782): A Study in Transoceanic Political Culture,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 47, no. 1 (2019): 1–27; Prasun Sonwalkar, “Indian Journalism in the Colonial Crucible,” Journalism Studies 16, no. 5 (2015): 624–636. Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 241. Eric Lewis Beverley, “Frontier as Resource: Law, Crime, and Sovereignty on the Margins of Empire,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 2 (2013): 250–255. Anja Gebel, “Human Nature and Morality in the Anti-Corruption Discourse of Transparency International,” Public Administration and Development 32 (2012): 109–128; Akhil Gupta, “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State,” American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (May, 1995): 375–402; Barry Hindess, “Investigating International Anti-Corruption,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 8 (2005): 1389–398; Kate Gillespie and Gwenn Okruhlik, “The Political Dimensions of Corruption Cleanups: A Framework for Analysis,” Comparative Politics 24, no. 1 (October, 1991): 92. Pieter de Vries, “The Orchestration of Corruption and Excess Enjoyment in Western Mexico,” in Corruption and the Secret of Law: A Legal Anthropological Perspective, eds. Gerhard Anders and Monique Nuijten (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 143–166.

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110. Ivan Krastev, Shifting Obsessions: Three Essays on the Politics of AntiCorruption (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), xiv, 69–70. 111. Letitia Lawson, “The Politics of Anti-Corruption Reform in Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 47, no. 1 (March, 2009): 73– 100; Giorgio Blundo, “Hidden Acts, Open Talks. How Anthropology Can ‘Observe’ and Describe Corruption,” in Corruption and the Secret of Law: A Legal Anthropological Perspective, eds. Gerhard Anders and Monique Nuijten (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 30–32; Peter Bratsis, “The Construction of corruption or rules of separation and illusions of purity in Bourgeois Societies,” Social Text 21, no. 4 (2003): 9–32; idem., “Political Corruption in the Age of Transnational Capitalism: From the Relative Autonomy of the State to the White Man’s Burden,” Historical Materialism 22, no. 1 (2014): 105–128; Mlada Bukovansky, “The Hollowness of Anti-Corruption Discourse,” Review of International Political Economy 13, no. 2 (2006): 181–209.

References Ansari, Sarah. “The Sind Blue Books of 1843 and 1844: The Political ‘Laundering’ of Historical Evidence.” The English Historical Review 120, no. 485 (2005): 35–65. Auckland, Knut. “Connecting British and Indian, Elite and Subaltern: Arthur Crawford and Corruption in the Later Nineteenth Century Western India.” South Asian History and Culture 4, no. 3 (2013): 314–335. Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Beverley, Eric Lewis. “Frontier as Resource: Law, Crime, and Sovereignty on the Margins of Empire.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 2 (2013): 241–272. Bhagavan, Manu. “Demystifying the ‘Ideal Progressive’: Resistance through Mimicked Modernity in Princely Baroda, 1900–1913.” Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (2001): 385–409. Blundo, Giorgio. “Hidden Acts, Open Talks. How Anthropology Can ‘Observe’ and Describe Corruption.” In Corruption and the Secret of Law: A Legal Anthropological Perspective, edited by Gerhard Anders and Monique Nuijten. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2009. Bratsis, Peter. “The Construction of Corruption or Rules of Separation and Illusions of Purity in Bourgeois Societies.” Social Text 21, no. 4 (2003): 9–32. Bratsis, Peter. “Political Corruption in the Age of Transnational Capitalism: From the Relative Autonomy of the State to the White Man’s Burden.” Historical Materialism 22, no. 1 (2014): 105–128.

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Bukovansky, Mlada. “The Hollowness of Anti-Corruption Discourse.” Review of International Political Economy 13, no. 2 (2006): 181–209. Chapman, John. Baroda and Bombay; their Political Morality. London: John Chapman, 1853. Copies of all Correspondence and Papers on the Subject of Colonel Outram’s Removal from the Office of Resident at the Court of the Guicowar, or on the Subject on the Alleged Corruption of Officers of the Bombay Government with Bribes from Baroda (HC, 560). de Vries, Pieter. “The Orchestration of Corruption and Excess Enjoyment in Western Mexico.” In Corruption and the Secret of Law: A Legal Anthropological Perspective, edited by Gerhard Anders and Monique Nuijten. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2009. East India. Return of the Subjects of His Highness the Guicowar Now Enjoying the British Guarantee (HC, 883), 1853. Elliot, F. A. H. The Rulers of Baroda. Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1879. Finn, Margot. “Material Turns in British History: II. Corruption: Imperial Power, Princely Politics and Gifts Gone Rogue.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society no. 29 (2019): 1–25. Fisher, Michael. Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764– 1858. Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Gaekwad, Fatesinhrao. Sayajirao of Baroda, the Prince and the Man. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1989. Gebel, Anja. “Human Nature and Morality in the Anti-Corruption Discourse of Transparency International.” Public Administration and Development 32 (2012): 109–128. Gilding, Ben. “The Rise and Fall of Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (1780–2): A Study in Transoceanic Political Culture.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 47, no. 1 (2019): 1–27. Gillespie, Kate and Gwenn Okruhlik. “The Political Dimensions of Corruption Cleanups: A Framework for Analysis.” Comparative Politics 24, no. 1 (October, 1991): 92. Goldsmid, F. J. James Outram: A Biography, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1880. Gould, William. Bureaucracy, Community, and Influence in India: Society and the State, 1930s–1960s. New York: Routledge, 2011. Gupta, Akhil. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.” American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (May, 1995): 375–402. Hardiman, David. “Baroda: The Structure of a Progressive State.” In People, Princes and Paramount Power. Society and Politics in the Indian Princely States, edited by Robin Jeffrey. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978.

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Hindess, Barry. “Investigating International Anti-Corruption.” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 8 (2005): 1389–1398. Indus. Bombay Briberies; A Tale of the Present Charter. London: Effingham Wilson, 1853. Jeejeebhoy, J. R. B. Bribery and Corruption in Bombay. Bombay: Sanj Vartaman Press, 1952. Kamerkar, Mani. British Paramountcy: British-Baroda Relations, 1818–1848. Bombay: Popular, 1980. Knights, Mark. Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire, 1600–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Kothekar, S. V. The Gaikwads of Baroda and the East India Company, 1770–1820. Nagpur: Nagpur University, 1977. Krastev, Ivan. Shifting Obsessions: Three Essays on the Politics of Anti-Corruption. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004. Lawson, Letitia. “The Politics of Anti-Corruption Reform in Africa.” Journal of Modern African Studies 47, no. 1 (March, 2009): 73–100. Leonard, Zak. “Law of Nations Theory and the Native Sovereignty Debates in Colonial India.” Law and History Review 38, no. 2 (2020): 374–407. Outram, James. Baroda Intrigues and Bombay Khutput, an Exposition of the Fallacies Promulgated by Mr. Lestock Robert Reid in a “Letter to the editor of The Daily News.” London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1853. Pavarala, Vinod. “Cultures of Corruption and the Corruption of Culture: the East India Company and the Hastings Impeachment.” In Corrupt Histories, edited by Emmanuel Kreike and William Chester Jordan. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004. Prior, Katherine, Lance Brennan, and Robin Haines. “Bad Language: The Role of English, Persian and Other Esoteric Tongues in the Dismissal of Sir Edward Colebrooke as Resident of Delhi in 1829.” Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 1 (2001): 75–112. Reid, Lestock. Letter to the Editor of the ‘Daily News’. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1853. Rice, Stanley. Life of Sayaji Rao III, Maharaja of Baroda. London: Oxford University Press, 1931. Saksena, Priyasha. “Jousting Over Jurisdiction: Sovereignty and International Law in Late Nineteenth-Century South Asia.” Law and History Review 38, no. 2 (2020): 409–457. Sonwalkar, Prasun. “Indian Journalism in the Colonial Crucible.” Journalism Studies 16, no. 5 (2015): 624–636. Sturman, Rachel. The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law, and Women’s Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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Sutherland, John. Sketches of the Relations Subsisting between the British Government in India, and the Different Native States. Calcutta: G. H. Huttman, 1837. Veevers, David. “‘Inhabitants of the Universe’: Global Families, Kinship Networks, and the Formation of the Early Modern Colonial State in Asia.” Journal of Global History 10 (2015): 99–121. Wilkinson, Callie. “Weak Ties in a Tangled Web? Relationships Between the Political Residents of the English East India Company and their Munshis, 1798–1818.” Modern Asian Studies 53, no. 5 (2019): 1574–1612.

PART II

Civilising Missions and “Oriental” Corruption During the Age of Modern Imperialism, c. 1900

CHAPTER 7

Colonial Normativity? Corruption in the Dutch–Indonesian Relationship in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Ronald Kroeze

Introduction There are many historical accounts that, one way or the other, have linked Dutch colonial rule of Indonesia to corruption. Works of historians have pointed at how the existence of a variety of corrupt practices, from bribery and patronage to all kinds of “extractive institutions”, undermined social and economic development.1 Others have paid attention to singular corruption scandals,2 or touched upon the theme of corruption in their analyses of ideological debates about decline and reform in the wake of the end of the Dutch United East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie/ VOC), and the emergence of the modern colonial state from around the year 1800.3 In the decades around 1900,

R. Kroeze (B) Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 R. Kroeze et al. (eds.), Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era, Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9_7

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corruption was linked to the granting and use of concession rights by big companies active in the colony,4 as well as to how public morality was understood and maintained by the colonial police.5 Even the famous novel Max Havelaar (1860), an accusation against colonial abuses written by the former colonial administrator Eduard Douwes Dekkers, can be considered as a book mainly about corruption.6 One of the rare academic texts that has colonial corruption as its main theme was written by Willem Wertheim in 1961. Wertheim, a former colonial official and thereafter a professor of sociology and modern history of Southeast Asia, took Max Havelaar as a starting point for an article on corruption in colonial Indonesia; however, it is brief.7 Moreover, although he takes a critical stance and he acknowledges the involvement of Dutch officials and entrepreneurs in cases of corruption, he struggles with both the concept of corruption as well as “Weberian style bureaucratization”, when he writes that the Dutch were hindered in their attempt to curb corruption and introduce modern government by “patrimonial” indigenous elites and local circumstances. He concludes that “as far as civil servants were incorruptible it was more because of sharp surveillance by European administrative institutions than that the Indonesian civil servants had embraced the new public ethics”.8 The examples of corruption he offers are, however, interesting in their variety: from bribery to nepotism, and from misuse of power to forms of illicit influencing and lobbying. In short, we can conclude that despite several examples, the relationship between corruption, colonial exploitation and modern empire-building has not been systematically investigated, whereas the relevance of this topic has been acknowledged, also more recently.9 Although such a research project would require a systematic analysis of different case studies, international comparison and cooperation with historians from Indonesia, which is what we do in the project Colonial Normativity,10 this text is an attempt to locate the topic of colonial corruption within the history of Dutch–Indonesian relations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, informed by historiographical trends and original research that was earlier executed. The ambiguities surrounding the concept of corruption probably have contributed to the lack of research so far. At first sight, issues as diverse as bribery, tax farming, patronage, deviating sexual norms, the decadence of the colonial elite or the decay of an entire colonial system have been linked to corruption, both by contemporaries and historians. Moreover, what is immoral to one, is not necessarily to the other, as understandings of corruption depend on ideological, political and cultural positions

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that differ—also over time and place. Recent historical research, however, of which the contributors of this volume have contributed to, provides methods and insights on how to deal with these challenges. First, researching corruption in different cultural and historical circumstances requires a contextual approach. Corruption can be understood as a deviation or putrefaction of something that was originally pure and good, and it has been defined as the misuse of public power and resources for private gain. However, the precise meaning of misuse, private gain and public power can only be understood when corruption is analysed in its specific social, legal and historical context.11 In more concrete terms, one could analyse publicly debated cases of misuse of public power or scandals, and be sensitive to what contemporaries considered to be corruption, as well as for what reasons. Moreover, the “politics of corruption” should not be forgotten. Throughout history, accusations of corruption were useful political weapons—as were campaigns against corruption in the name of just rule or good government; they might have intended reform and been supported by many, they often also strengthened the access to power and resources of some, while still undermining those of others.12 With regard to the colonial setting, there are more things to keep in mind. As Xavier Huetz de Lemps shows in his contribution about the Philippines, the colony is a place where very different groups—ordinary people, indigenous elites, intermediaries of different descent, Western colonisers—live and compete for power and resources. These different groups share, but also obey, different values and norms. This “plurality of norms” can lead to “competition of norms”,13 which can cause disputes about what is acceptable public and private behaviour that can turn into accusations of and debates about corruption, as historical research has shown.14 Furthermore, corruption in a colonial setting is not about the colony only, but takes place in an imperial context in which the metropole and colony influence each other.15 Like Mark Knights and Zak Leonard, Pol Dalmau and Tanja Bührer show in their respective contributions to this volume, political changes in the metropole can have a huge impact on what is considered corruption. And as Jonathan Saha argues, the relationship between administration and society in the colony and in the metropole influences understandings of colonial corruption. In order to further develop this argument, I focus on the Netherlands-Indonesian case and start by explaining how the historiography on European corruption, including the idea of an emergence of a so-called “modern” understanding of corruption from around 1800, has inspired

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me to locate the topic of corruption in the history of colonial rule of Indonesia. After having introduced the topic of colonial corruption in relation with ideas of “progress” in the decades around 1800, I continue by discussing colonial corruption in the light of the history of the “Cultivation System” (1830s–1870s), the “Liberal period” and the “Ethical Policy” (officially launched in 1901)—the Dutch equivalent of the civilising mission.16 In the final sections of this chapter, I try to shed light on the persistence of corruption in the history of the Dutch–Indonesian relationship.

Corruption and Reform in Europe and the Colony: An Entangled History? Recent years saw a series of publications on the role of corruption in the process of European state formation since the late eighteenth century.17 From these studies, it can be distilled that corruption came in many forms, but also had recurrent features: in public debates corruption stood for the bad, immoral and rotten elements of politics and society. Additionally, corruption was often understood as the abuse of public power, trust or resources for private (or group) benefit. Nonetheless, as mentioned above, one should not forget that morality, abuse or the public–private divide were understood differently over time and place. Next, these studies have shown how denunciators accused others of corruption18 and that systematic anticorruption campaigns were useful weapons to undermine opponents and what they stood for.19 Although some debate remains about how sharp the break with the past was, historians have also pointed to the emergence of a new “modern” understanding of corruption in political discourse from around 1800.20 From the perspective of corruption, the French Revolution, and its counterparts, could be understood as an attack on all kinds of practices (e.g. tax farming, gifts, patronage, elite privileges), as well as the system they were a part of—the Ancien Régime—which became synonymous with corruption. In contemporary analyses, the mixing up of private (personal, family and faction) and public (state, general, national or people’s) interests was at the heart of what was wrong with the Ancien Régime. Reformers argued that corruption could only be rooted out with a radical change of regime, to be followed by a clear separation of the public and private. Corruption became predominantly defined as the misuse of public office for private gain (although broader and general

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understandings of corruption as a (bad) deviation of something that was pure and whole before, remained in place as well). In the Netherlands, the failed Dutch Patriotic reform of the 1780s, or the reformers that successfully overthrew the old Dutch Republic of the United Provinces (1588–1795)—the Dutch Ancien Régime—and established the Batavian Republic in 1795, did use the more modern understanding of corruption when they argued for a regime change based on a legal and constitutional separation between the public and private. Church and state were separated and specific anticorruption laws were established that prohibited public servants from merging their public duties and private interests, such as bans on tax farming, the sale of offices and accepting gifts.21 Around 1800, the situation in the metropole and the overseas possessions influenced each other (see also the chapters by Tanja Bührer and Anubha Anushree).22 In the Netherlands–Indonesian situation, reformers argued that the corruption and decline of the old Dutch Republic was entangled with the corruption and decline of the Dutch United East India Company, the VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie; whose full name could also be read as Vergaan Onder Corruptie 23 —Perished Under Corruption).The VOC had the monopoly on trade with Asia, but after periods of economic expansion and success became less profitable and lost terrain to the British East India Company (EIC), as well as to local trading networks. VOC officials often acted as representative of the VOC, local administrator, judge in legal disputes and trader, alike. Trading on their own account and keeping a share of the profit was also common and acceptable until a certain level—the VOC even regarded it as a means to prevent (more) corruption. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, due to patronage as well as the increasing financial inability of the VOC to maintain all of its positions in Southeast Asia, VOC representatives on the ground obtained and took more room.24 This met with criticism for different reasons. First, while the position of the VOC as a whole kept deteriorating, certain VOC officials took good care of themselves. In other places, the situation for the trading and governing elites was still rather good, such as on the North-East coast of Java, where due to a switch to the production of cash crops for the world market, profits continued to be made.25 Additionally, critical voices were inspired by the ideology of Republicanism, which went through a period of revival and emphasised the importance of (serving) the public interest, as well as Enlightenment ideas about popular sovereignty and creating progress through rationality and freedom (including free trade).

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They blamed VOC representatives for neither acting with civic virtue— with respect for the moral health of the Dutch Republic and general well-being—nor running their trading posts rationally and efficiently in order to enhance progress in the common interest. State-supported trade monopolies, such as the VOC was, became a symbol of everything that was wrong about the old regime. When Dutch revolutionaries with French support replaced the Dutch Republic with the Batavian Republic (1795–1806), the VOC was first nationalised (1795) and then terminated (1799). Although Indonesian possessions were placed under a state committee in the Netherlands, the first years after the fall of the Ancien Régime continued to provide much discretionary powers to men on the spot—including to indigenous elites and Chinese traders.26 In 1806, the Batavian Republic was transformed into the Kingdom of Holland, a vassal state of the French empire with Louis Napoleon as its king, a brother of Emperor Napoleon. Louis Napoleon appointed Herman Willem Daendels, who served as Governor General of the Dutch East Indies from 1807 until 1810. In 1811, the British invaded Java and installed Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles; in the years of Daendels and Raffles, a series of reforms in the name of “progress” were initiated. They aimed to strengthening state control and create more room for free entrepreneurship—aims both ungirded by eliminating practices that were by that time labelled as corruption. Daendels, for example, challenged the powers of the old elites (Oudgastenpartij ) known for patronage and nepotism. He also built, with the help of numerous ill-treated serviced labourers, the Grote Postweg —a road that cut across Java to improve communication, centralisation and state control. Raffles, in his rhetorical distancing of British rule from VOC rule, aimed for progress through turning local aristocrats into salaried officials by taking their privileges, such as overcharging, percentages and gifts, as well as by promoting free entrepreneurship and free labour, which he hoped could be directly taxed and end existing tax collecting practices, such as a tax farming.27 Thus, around the year 1800, regimes had been changed—both in the metropole and colony—in the name of eliminating corruption. Throughout the nineteenth century, patronage, sale of offices, tax farming, elite privileges, gifts and other examples of the combining of public and private continued to be denounced as corruption and to inspire reform. According to Jens Ivo Engels, the nineteenth century saw the rise of the absolute non-toleration of these forms of corruption.28

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This is, of course, neither to say that privilege, patronage or other examples of corruption disappeared in historical reality, nor did the debate end about how to define (violations of) the right public-private relationship. On the contrary: the nineteenth century saw the birth of modern ideologies and parties that held different views on what was moral and corrupt in the respective public and private spheres. Nonetheless, many— for example Liberals—continued to look critically at the principle of blurring public and private. The Dutch Liberal Johan Thorbecke, the man behind the introduction of the Dutch reformed constitution of 1848, diagnosed that the blending of public and private interests, offices and the system of privileges, founded in custom law, was the main problem of the Ancien Régime and the foremost reason for the French Revolution and its European counterparts.29 Liberals became known for idealising the “art of separation”: state and economy; religion and politics; morality and law.30 Later on, radical ideologies such as Socialism were also obsessed with altering the public–private divide by just denying the existence of a distinctive public and private sphere as a means to reach into the mythical corruption-free modern era.31 Another characteristic was that, in the wake of Enlightenment ideas about linear progress,32 the modern interpretation of corruption had a historical dimension. As corruption was discussed as a problem of the Ancien Régime, it became understood as a problem of the past, as one can derive from the work and speeches of politicians, publicists and historians in the nineteenth century. In Britain, politicians tried to solve what they called the problem of “old corruption”—i.e. bribing voters, the “sale” of offices in the form of offering lucrative positions (with emoluments) and honours to political friends in return for their support—which, in fact, characterised British politics far into the nineteenth century and beyond. However, these elements continued to be understood as being remnants from the past.33 For the Dutch case, Mary Lindeman, has pointed to the great number of texts on the corruption of the Dutch Republic that date from the second half of the nineteenth century, and the first half of the twentieth century—several of them written by prominent Dutch historians such as Robert Fruin and Pieter Geyl.34 These historians emphasised the use of patronage and “oligarchical” power structures (an oligarchy is an aristocratic government that is corrupted according to Classical political philosophy), the sale of offices and the famous “contracts of correspondence” that were used to divide and secure offices among the most prominent families in the Republic.35 In the same tradition, the

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Liberal reform of 1848 was regarded a turning point, as historian Chris te Lintum—while referring to the work of Fruin—stated in his book A century of progress in 1913. According to Te Lintum, it was at this moment that politics came under public scrutiny, and because of that, all past corruption was eliminated.36 The understanding of corruption as a problem of past regimes in combination with the self-confidence of the Dutch that they had reached into the corruption-free modern era, in a context of increasing nationalism, also gave rise to the argument that corruption belonged to “a foreign country”, to a historical, cultural and geographical “Other”.37 As with debates about corruption around the year 1800, which portrayed the VOC and the old Dutch Republic as remnants from a corrupt past, in mid- and late-nineteenth-century newspapers and parliamentary debates, corruption was linked firstly to British elections (“old corruption”) and French politics (the country of the Ancien Régime par excellence), and later to “Eastern” or “Oriental” regimes such as the Austrian, Russian or Ottoman empires. Throughout this era, Dutch colonial possessions were also repeatedly debated as the corrupt “Other”. This took place in a broader context of extending colonial borders and emerging imperialist and orientalist views,38 as is discussed below.

The Nineteenth-Century Cultivation System: Breeding Ground for Corruption After the defeat of Napoleon between 1814 and 1815, the British returned the Dutch East Indies to the Netherlands as part of the British supported vision of the Netherlands as a middle-size power that would include colonial possessions.39 The autocratic King Willem I was keen on creating a new empire, with Java being the most important site of his “imperial phantasies”,40 and wanted to ensure that the colony could finance itself. Willem I thus stuck to development through the means on which the colonial reforms of around 1800 were based, such as centralisation of administrative powers and bureaucratisation of governing elites. The prosecuting of officials for bureaucratic corruption, such as in the case of high Dutch officials who took bribes in return for granting indigenous aristocrats with public offices, is evidence that the reforms indeed caused things to change. However, when the High Court had to decide about their punishment, it had to rely on structures of the VOC era that were more flexible to these forms of corruption.41

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The same kind of plurality or competition of norms existed in the domain of economic policy. At first, Willem I promoted free entrepreneurship and free labour, but when this did not pay off as was hoped for, and also in response to the money-consuming Java War (1825– 1830), a war itself clearly linked to the period of revolutions of around 1800,42 he appointed Johannes van den Bosch as governor general in 1830.43 Van den Bosch introduced the infamous Cultivation System that was based on the claim that all the land belonged to the Dutch state and a government-controlled economic policy of entrepreneurship that historians have characterised as a “quasi-mercantilist exploitation”. The Cultivation System also showed similarity with the eighteenth-century economic exploitation of Java by the VOC, as it was founded on forced labour and the support of the indigenous elites.44 Plantations had to cultivate what the colonial government ordered such as sugar, coffee, tea or indigo. The Netherlands Trading Society (Nederlandse Handelmaatschappij / NHM), founded in 1824, was given the trade monopoly and sold the crops on the world market. In return, the state and NHM would guarantee stable prices that were relatively high. Dutch plantation supervisors and entrepreneurs, as well as the Dutch state, earned huge profits (batig slot ), the latter used to finance infrastructural projects in the Netherlands.45 The overall growth of the global trade was one reason for its success; that the Cultivation System was based on forced labour, even after the formal abolition of enslavement in the Dutch East Indies in 1860,46 was another.47 The indigenous elites also played a role in maintaining the system. The Dutch had established a system of dual rule in which Dutch colonial administrators—(assistant) residenten—and the local aristocrats— regenten—governed together, as the Dutch could not rule and judge without “the information, networks, and prestige of the Javanese elite officials (priyayi)”.48 Indigenous regents, in return for their support, were given land and seigneurial rights: local peasants had to dedicate a considerable amount of their time to work on princely lands without being paid. A separation of powers, the norm in the motherland at least formally, was absent; practically as the Dutch administrators remained in the position of ultimate arbiter, ideally as the “Oriental” nature required firm control of power in one hand, so it was argued.49 There are examples similar to this one. Tax farming, abolished in the metropole since it was regarded as one of the most evident examples of Ancien Régime corruption,50 continued to exist in Indonesia

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throughout the nineteenth century. The colonial government granted both local heads as well as Chinese middlemen the right to collect taxes and keep a percentage as remuneration. On the ground, a great variety of collecting mechanisms existed together with a great deal of wheeling and dealing, both between taxpayers and tax collectors, as well as between the colonial administrators and the tax collectors, providing ample opportunities for tensions, arbitrariness and outright misuse.51 The pivotal role of the Chinese middlemen in fiscal and economic matters went back to the time of the VOC: they had developed sophisticated means to both successfully collect and lend money. By the end of the nineteenth century, their role gave rise to the framing of the Chinese middlemen as immoral moneygrubbers, also fed by Dutch accusations and unease about the deteriorating circumstances of Javanese peasants who carried the heaviest tax burden.52 The plurality of norms that existed in the Dutch empire during the era of the Cultivation System, and the accompanying immoralities, formed a fertile breeding ground for debates about corruption and reform already since 1848 and especially from the 1860s onwards, when Liberals began to dominate Dutch politics. Liberal reformists asked for more room for private entrepreneurship as the state controlled the business sector too much and the colonial administration granted plantations to “friends”, linking the Cultivation System to economic inefficiency as well as patronage and nepotism. Secondly, moral concerns were raised about the treatment of the Javanese peasants who were forced to work on the plantations, also as a way to “pay” their taxes. That the colonial system of dual rule lacked a separation of powers was furthermore targeted as grounds for abuse.53 Max Havelaar helped to turn the many immoralities associated with the Dutch colonial system into a wider public concern within the Netherlands.54 This famous novel was published in 1860 by Multatuli, a pseudonym for Eduard Douwes Dekker, a former Dutch colonial administrator (assistant-resident ) of the district of Lebak in Java between 1855 and 1856.55 In 1856 he resigned, returned to Europe and wrote Max Havelaar, informed by his own experiences. The book was, in fact, one big attack on a great variety of corrupt practices. Besides addressing that a successful career in the colonial service depended on patronage and favouritism, more importantly Max Havelaar denounced a culture of administrative malpractices and described how an indigenous prince had misused his powers, for he confiscated cattle from the local peasants

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and asked for seigneurial services as a form of taxation, which was officially forbidden as extortion (knevelarij).56 Douwes Dekkers saw this as systemic corruption, as it took place on such a frequent scale that the local population lived in misery. That the colonial administrator in the novel sent in official complaints—even to the governor general in Batavia—but did not hear back, was another type of corruption: turning a blind eye towards misuse, even when officially reported. Plurality of norms was a breeding ground here as well: colonial officials had the responsibility to report administrative corruption, but the governor general also had the discretionary power to decide whether or not the complaint would be followed up on if upholding stability, esteem and authority required so. Max Havelaar ended with a plea that citizens of a self-respected Christian nation should no longer tolerate the abuse of the local population by the indigenous aristocrats, a type of argumentation that had been used to legitimise the expansion of colonial control already as early as the eighteenth century. Max Havelaar was a shock to contemporaries, but neither written nor understood as a plea to end colonial rule. The main results of the publication and accompanying debates were that in the decades thereafter, a new generation of men were inspired to become colonial administrators,57 alongside efforts to improve the education of colonial administrators in order to better understand indigenous society and equip them to carry out the so-called “white man’s burden”.58 Conservatives in favour of the status quo, including maintaining the Cultivation System, such as minister of Colonial Affairs Johannes Jerphaas Hasselman tried to counter negative sentiments, even by secretly financing the famous journalist Conrad Busket Huet to turn the Java-bode in a pro-Conservative colonial newspaper, leading to a scandal in 1868.59 This “Conservative-intermezzo” in Dutch political history could not prevent the Liberal majority in Dutch Parliament from asking for measures, that led to the termination of the Cultivation System by the 1870s. Besides concerns about diminishing revenues and economic opportunities, the reforms were also framed in moralistic terms. For example, the Agrarian Law (1869) opened uncultivated land for exploitation by entrepreneurs, but land could only be leased and not confiscated to fence private claims. Meanwhile, the Sugar Law (1870) opened up the sugar industry, but issued that peasants could no longer be forced to cultivate sugar. Earlier, the Liberal Minister of Colonial Affairs Franssen van de Putte, himself a former director of a sugar plantation who had returned to the Netherlands as a wealthy man, had

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brought an end to the obligation for the indigenous population to work in communal forests, as well as to corporal punishment by restricting the powers of the local village heads (dessahoofden); their role and behaviour were seen as reasons for many abuses. Additionally, extra bans and penalties on extortion were introduced, and in 1869 an important step in the separation of powers was taken in order to strengthen enforcement of rules, when it was decided to appoint trained jurists to lead local courts, instead of leaving it to administrators.60 However, newspapers continued to report abuses: civil servants, both Dutch and indigenous, confiscated cattle for transportation or asked the indigenous peasants to deliver crops and fruits, which in colonial newspapers were labelled as “misuse” and “malpractice”, because they were against the “law” and “humanity”.61 This type of corruption was an especially serious issue when Dutch officials were involved, as this undermined Dutch prestige: the Dutch had to set the example of good government, and only then one could expect indigenous officials to follow—as the colonial newspaper De Locomotief wrote in 1869.62 These examples testify that newspapers—even those with a reputation for being critical— expressed ideas of racial hierarchy, by suggesting the issue of colonial corruption could be solved by upholding “Dutch” legal and humanitarian norms within the context of an indigenous “corrupt feudal society”.63

“Corrupt Concessions”, Growing Unease and the Dutch Civilising Discourse The end of the Cultivation System was followed by a “Liberal period” that led to increasing private investments and activities.64 However, this is not to say that the role of the state in colonial affairs diminished— to the contrary. Entrepreneurs could acquire land from local princes and lower aristocrats for relatively low prices, but only because the colonial state claimed to be the ultimate owner of the land and granted licences to formally legitimate transactions (see also the chapter in this volume on paperwork by Jonathan Saha). Moreover, private agreements between European entrepreneurs and local elites had to be confirmed by the colonial administration in order to become effective.65 Next, to control the indentured workers (who were referred to using the derogatory term “coolies” or “koelies ” in Dutch during the era) and make profits, the “Coolie Ordinance” gave private companies the right to use force on their own territories. Thus, they were granted a right that is and already at the

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time was, regarded as essential to modern state formation, namely the right to legitimately use force on your territory. The acquisition of land and the right to exploit and control it, including the labourers working on it, were the sources of new accusations of corruption. On the one hand, the process of granting licences came with violations of local rights and was vulnerable to favouritism. On the other hand, once granted the extensive rights given to private entrepreneurs came with very harsh working conditions and exorbitant profits, resulting in public dismay, scandals and investigations.66 This type of corruption surrounding concessions was no mere incident: it was at stake in other colonial empires as well, as shown in the contribution to this volume by Didier Guignard; for the Dutch case several examples can be provided.67 One such case is the Billiton scandal of 1882 to 1892,68 which was about an extension of a concession to extract tin ore from the island of Billiton. The original concession was granted to the Billiton company in 1852 for 40 years; in 1882 an extension of another 35 years, starting from 1892, was provided by Governor General Frederick s’ Jacob. In the Dutch press and in Dutch Parliament, the agreement was seen as illegal and immoral because Parliament was not consulted and the conditions upon which the extension was granted were way too favourable to the company and its shareholders. Parliament issued an investigative committee, who confirmed the illegality and immorality of the concession forcing the minister of colonial affairs and the governor general to resign. Years of renegotiations followed, during which the Billiton company was also accused of other forms of corruption, such as bribing local officials, ill-treating the Chinese indentured labourers, tolerating opium smuggling, abuse of its taxation and custom rights, as well as misuse of its policing powers. The company argued that many of these issues were inherently related to the harsh local circumstances and to the culture the Chinese kongsies (collaborations between indentured labourers) brought with them. Critical voices, however, blamed the company for neither acting “modern” nor as a “good father” and because of that, endangering Dutch authority and esteem. Some Dutch MPs proposed to publicly exploit the tin mines on Billiton.69 Under parliamentary pressure and the threat of nationalisation, in 1892 the company was prepared to accept an extension of the concession that was based on a taxation of 62.5 per cent of the net profit, instead of the 10 per cent agreed in 1882. The company kept its policing powers; in fact, this private

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company needed to act more “governmentally” as some MPs had argued in Parliament.70 These, and other examples, not only support the argument that the “nexus between business and expansion has been crucial in the Dutch case”,71 but also make clear how public and private, business and state, economic and political interests were blurred, not so much as a sideeffect, but openly and intendedly. This led to tensions and scandals that were used to adapt or reinstal norms that did not take away the breeding ground for this type of corruption as such. Besides the Billiton scandal, one could point to the ongoing unease and discussions about how colonial lobbyists, including former ministers, tried to prevent the inception of stricter social regulations and corporate taxation in the years around 1900.72 Alternatively, the scandal caused by the Deli company that exploited tobacco in Sumatra, and became a synonym to “brutal repression, deceit and maltreatment” of indentured labourers, was backed by the Coolie Ordinance which gave extreme legal powers to companies. These powers included the right to prosecute and sanction— the poenale sanctie, in force until 1931—in order “to deal” with their workers.73 Misuse of these powers also led to the so-called “coolie’ scandal” (1903–1905), after an investigation (the Rhemrev report) revealed systematic ill-treatment of labourers on the plantations of Sumatra as well as how entrepreneurs were “protected” by the colonial administration.74 Although often framed as incidents by contemporaries, there were recurrent investigations into what were considered exorbitant private revenues and immoral behaviour of companies, which were linked to the deprived position (mindere welvaart) of peasants and workers.75 The “Ethical Policy” (ethische politiek) is important to take into account in order to understand the moral disputes and scandals during these years. In 1901, the Ethical Policy was officially proclaimed by Queen Wilhelmina (1898–1948) in her yearly address at the opening of the parliamentary year. There she stated: “As a Christian power, the Netherlands has an obligation … to suffuse every part of government policy with the consciousness that the Netherlands has a moral obligation to the people of that region”.76 From a comparative perspective, the Ethical Policy can be considered the Dutch equivalent of the civilising missions that were launched by other imperial powers during this era. According to the advocates of the Ethical Policy, the Dutch did not have a right to exploit, but rather an obligation to develop the colony through investments in education, infrastructure and social policy, which would also

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strengthen the legitimacy of colonial rule. Besides a long-lasting discussion about immoral practices and corruption in the colony, the Ethical Policy was also the result of changing circumstances “at home”; it was announced in the context of social policy established as an answer to the “social question”.77 The Ethical Policy was supported by socially minded Liberals and Orthodox-Protestants, and even prominent SocialDemocrats such as MP Henri van Kol, who saw the task of the Dutch to be a father educating his children to prepare them for independence.78 Although investments in health care and education were complete, the Ethical Policy went hand-in-hand with growing distrust in the local elites. The Orthodox-Protestant Titus Asch van Wijk—Minister of Colonial Affairs in the cabinet of Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper (1901–1905) that launched the Ethical Policy—when discussing the role of the Dutch in exploiting Indonesian Archipelago resources, argued that colonial policy’s main aim was “to protect the population from the extortionate practices of their own leaders”.79 When looking at the training and appointment procedures of colonial officials after 1900, the Ethical Policy and “white man’s burden” led to concern with improvement through better understandings of local circumstances, but it did not result in the inclusion of indigenous elite members in the Dutch-controlled colonial administration, because of racially inspired mechanisms of distrust and hierarchy.80 In the 1920s and 1930s, financial reasons and disappointments about the results of the policy, including that better education contributed to the creation of a self-aware group of indigenous men such as Sukarno and Hatta who asked for independence of Indonesia, led to the abandonment of the Ethical Policy. In fact, the colonial state turned into something that increasingly resembled a police state, including an emphasis on public order and moral purity, which led to actions and corruption scandals that were seen as arbitrary and racially driven.81

Conclusion: On the Persistence of Corruption in a (Post-)Colonial Context Throughout the nineteenth century, colonial corruption was an issue of recurrent debate and stimulant to reforms. The many examples of (campaigns against) corruption, lead to the question: how to understand the persistence of colonial corruption? The historiography of corruption in Europe has pointed to the role of plurality and competition of norms as

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a breeding ground for corruption.82 Clearly, this is also relevant to understanding colonial corruption. When from around 1800 “bureaucratic”, “Dutch” or “modern” norms were introduced—for example by turning former representatives of the VOC and indigenous elites into salaried bureaucrats who had to represent and serve state interests—strikingly, this went alongside strengthening a system of dual rule that, again, allowed for privileges for certain groups and individuals. Furthermore, bureaucratic changes were also half-heartedly taken, or deliberately abandoned after a while, for economic and financial reasons. That in the colonial context, economy and politics or entrepreneurial and state interests were structurally entangled was another reason for competition of norms. The latter was undergirded by policies which intentionally assigned public tasks to different groups: administration and ultimately arbiter authority to the Dutch, tax farming and dual rule supporting bureaucrats, respectively, to leading Chinese and indigenous aristocrats and indentured labour to indigenous peasants and Chinese “koelies ”. Finally, the existence of varied and competing norms was the result of an imperial context in which norms that were established in the “motherland”, such as the abolishment of tax farming or the separation of powers, were not upheld in the colony. Thus, as conflicting norms were no mere incidents, but structural to colonial rule, it is not surprising that corruption was structurally evident. To better understand the persistence of corruption in modern society, from a meta-level perspective, the European historiography has pointed to the mythical or false assumptions underlying ideas about modernity— such as the problematic nature of the concept of (linear) progress, as well as the multiple forms (understandings of) “modernity” can take and the impossibility to completely separate the public and private, or to reach into the ideal situation of the corruption-free modern society.83 Additionally, from a macro-level perspective, the implementation of supposedly “good” and “just” modern institutions—such as impersonal and rational bureaucratic rule—has had paradoxical consequences as they were also a breeding ground for new forms of corruption—for example, bureaucratic corruption. From a micro-level perspective, the above insights are supported by the great number of scandals and cases of misuse of public power that have been located by historians, again falsifying the notion that corruption was solely a problem of early modern societies, or incidental in modern and contemporary history. Emphasising the persistence of corruption should not be confused with the denial of change and

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difference in history—certain (and serious) forms of corruption did disappear—but to make us sensitive to the fact that there is no automatic relationship between less corruption and the modern era. For a better understanding of colonial corruption in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we also have to include the historiography on colonialism and imperialism. Although often not about colonial corruption very specifically, it draws our attention to the intentional character of colonial corruption, either in the form of a structural lack of dedication to set and maintain norms, or by creating difference “through corruption” in order to rule and instal awe.84 Concerning the first issue, European colonialism was “empire on the cheap”, as Frederick Cooper argues: there was a constant lack of dedication in providing the necessary financial resources and men (e.g. administrators‚ jurists, policemen, doctors) to introduce and maintain “modern” standards.85 The earlier discussed example of the Dutch decision in 1869 to strengthen the separation of powers by sending trained jurists to the Dutch East Indies to lead courtrooms (landraden) is telling. It would have required a number of jurists the government was never willing to recruit and pay for, therefore even by Indonesian independence in 1945, no separation of powers existed in many parts of the archipelago.86 Concerning the issue of creating difference “through corruption”, it is insightful to make use of how the paradoxes of “modernity” have been understood in new imperial and (post-)colonial historiography.87 Colonial corruption can be seen as “a way of talking about the world”—an important part of the “language of modernity”.88 Debates on corruption can be studied and seen as concrete examples of the discourses on “modernity” and “modernisation” and their consequences: colonial corruption was used both as a practice and as a rhetorical act of denunciation to make powerful claims and counterclaims in the name of cultural, political and economic modernisation.89 To make sense of what was at stake—or to incorporate it into the language of modernity—contemporary representatives of colonial rule recurrently portrayed corruption as the outcome of the “traditional”, “uncivilised”, “feudal” or “barbarian” circumstances, and thus fighting and solving corruption as a modern, rational and Dutch or European concern. According to this narrative of self-legitimisation, the colonial administration tried to do whatever it could do to prevent and stop injustices, while at the same time labelling corruption as an inherent part of the “Other”. Nonetheless, this was a tricky strategy, as is

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also evident in the Dutch case. Colonial corruption could only be acceptable for a while, but abnormal in terms of ideas about the future. Not surprisingly, quite early on there was talk of a link between colonial rule and colonial corruption, instead of one between colonial rule and good government. Maybe even less surprising, and as another type of historical evidence, after a while representatives of the colonial administration began to lose their faith in civilisational ideology. Institutions, and their staff, which had been established to investigate and curb abuse of powers (for example, health and labour inspections at plantations), left their offices disappointed or began to point at the necessity of harsh sanctions that strikingly came with modern colonial exploitation, but were presented as a way to deal with specific local circumstances.90 Additionally, new imperial history—as does global history—makes us sensitive to understanding colonial corruption and responses to it as part of an entangled history. Anticorruption measures were often inspired by circumstances in the motherland and the colony alike; see the period of denouncing Ancien Régime corruption and promoting reform in the years around 1800, or responses to the “social question” and the need to check private businesses in the years around 1900. Keeping the problem of colonial corruption on the agenda could also have served to redirect attention from political tensions at home, or served a type of nationalism based on assumptions of Dutch moral superiority. This contribution was about the Dutch–Indonesian relationship, but the role colonial corruption played in this case is not unique.91 Guignard has shown the existence of corrupt practices for French Algeria— i.e. misuse of power, electoral fraud, illegal appropriation of land and resources, the dubious granting of concessions, arbitrary rule and judicial and administrative ambiguity when misuses were reported—as well as how the denunciation or silencing of corruption depended on political circumstances in the motherland.92 Saha has shown with the case of colonial Myanmar around the year 1900, how corruption was framed in the press, administration and political scene as a local, traditional and “Oriental” practice that could hardly be rooted out. At the same time, British officials gave room to local subordinates, often non-white and non-British, to abuse their position so that the British could reprimand or prosecute subordinates in order to show that the colonial administration did its best to curb corruption. However, just as often, petitions about misuse were neglected if they were regarded a danger to colonial rule. Thus, according

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to Saha, corruption—in these different forms—was “everyday” to colonial rule because “[c]orruption was performative. It was often through acts of malfeasance and misconduct that the state was manifested and experienced in everyday life”.93 Informed by the above, we need to rethink examples of practices and debates about corruption and their responses in the context of colonial empires; they were occurring in a great variety and were no mere incidents. Moreover, they might have been among the most useful to create and cement difference and asymmetrical power relations: the colony was corrupt, the metropole was not, hence colonial elites were “allowed” to interfere and set norms in the colony. This explains why the colonial administrations dealt with the anxiety of corruption rather softly: there was no desire to completely eliminate corruption because its existence of a systemic problem legitimised colonial rule.94 Additionally, to find legitimacy for colonial rule, the imperial government itself played a significant role in the creation and reproduction of “local” corruption, which needed to be countered and curbed with “modern” means. In other words, colonial rule was one great anticorruption project that would, could and should never be finished.95 Understanding colonial rule as a process of creating outcomes that had to be curbed by anticorruption projects, is a perspective that could be useful for further research into the entangled history of (post-)colonial “spaces of morality”.96 For the long nineteenth century, there is much more to say about the Indonesian perspective. For example, how did the variety of indigenous actors understand, contribute to or counter the “corrupt colony” during the eras of the Cultivation System or the Ethical Policy? Also, what was the role of denouncing corrupt colonialism for Indonesian nationalists working towards independence from the 1910s onwards?97 Moreover, how was their understanding rooted in an entangled history? Take, for example, Sukarno’s critique on colonialism,98 the criticism against colonial rule coincided criticism against indigenous feudalism and the aristocracy in connection to luxury and decadence.99 Or references in newspapers in which the ill-treatment of the population that were, in “modern” style, linked to the return to a corrupt past. In the Soerabaiasch Handelsblad in 1934, Joesoef Jahja Nasoetion—the editor of the paper Persatoen Indonesia—was accused of spreading hate against the Dutch Indies Government (the haatzaai artikelen). In an article on the conditions of the Bangka local government, he mentioned that the government wanted to destroy the economy

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of the local people, kill the Partindo (a non-cooperative political party), keep the people of Bangka ignorant and return to a time of “arbitrary rule and corruption”.100 During the struggle for independence and in the first years of independence in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Netherlands, the Dutch Indies and the Indonesian Republic labelled each other’s governments as being corrupt. On the other hand, Indonesian attempts to develop the country in the 1950s were inspired by indigenous political traditions, colonial understandings of corruption and Dutch bureaucratic expertise—as well as US modernisation theories.101 Strikingly, in the 1950s, the Indonesian military installed a series of anticorruption measures which eventually cleared the way for a gradual military takeover of the state. After the military takeover, the Dutch–Indonesian relationship changed again, and an Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI) was installed to streamline and coordinate the relationship under the label of development aid. Development aid ideally would bring prosperity and end corruption, but it also led to activities that became associated with the structural existence of KKN (Korupsi, Kolusi, Nepotisme; Corruption, Collusion, Nepotism).102 Finally, with the help of an historical approach of corruption, the origins of contemporary understandings can be reinvestigated—such as contemporary rankings which stress that many former colonies are among the most corrupt and that have a great impact on stereotyping and foreign investments.103 What are the historical legacies and dynamics behind these indices? Research into this topic could also shed more light on the link between colonialism and today’s corruption—a relationship quite often suggested but only incidentally researched104 —and to get beyond “colonial determinism”, in which the colonial past is an umbrella source to explain the present.105 Acknowledgements I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewers consulted by Palgrave, as well as to Susan Legêne, Alicia Schrikker, Farabi Fakih, Maarten Manse and to the participants of the conference “The Corrupt Colony?” (Amsterdam January 2019) for their comments on earlier versions of this text. Additionally, to Bel Parnell for her corrections. Finally, I would like to thank CLUE+ the interfaculty Research Institute for Culture, Cognition, History and Heritage of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for a grant that made it possible to publish this chapter open access.

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Notes 1. Jan Luiten van Zanden and Daan Marks, An Economic History of Indonesia 1800–2010 (London: Routledge, 2012), 30, 31, 72, 107 and 113; Ewout Frankema and Frans Buelens, Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development. The Belgian Congo and the Netherlands Indies Compared (London: Routledge, 2013), 122–124. 2. Kees Briët, Het proces van Rijck van Prehn en Johannes Wilhelmus Winter. Een bijzondere zaak voor het Hooggerechtshof van Nederlands-Indië in 1820 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2012). 3. Alicia Schrikker, “Restoration in Java 1815–1830: A Review,” BMGN— Low Countries Historical Review 130, no. 4 (2015): 134 and 135; Chris Niertrasz, In the shadow of the company: The Dutch East India Company and Its’ Servants in the Period of Its’ Decline 1740–1796 (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 4. Ronald Kroeze, “Dutch Political Modernization and the Billiton Case (1882–1892). The Usefulness of a Neoclassical Contextual Approach to Corruption,” in Integration, Legitimation, Koruption. Politische Patronage in Früher Neuzeit und Moderne, eds. Ronald G. Asch, Birgit Emich and Jens I. Engels (Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 285–307. 5. Marieke Bloembergen, De geschiedenis van de politie in Nederlands-Indië: uit zorg en angst (Amsterdam: Boom; Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij, 2009). 6. Multatuli [Eduard Douwes Dekker], Max Havelaar. Of de Koffiveilingen der Nederlandse Handel-maatschappy (Amsterdam: Antheneum—Polak & Van Gennep, 2011 [1860]). 7. Willem F. Wertheim, “Corruptie,” in Geld en geweten. Een bundel opstellen over anderehalve eeuw Nederlands bestuur in de Indonesische archipel, deel 2: het tijdvak tussen 1900–1942, ed. C. Fasseur (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhof, 1980), 213–221. Originally published as W.F. Wertheim, “Corruptie als sociologisch studieobject,” in Corruptie, eds. Willen F. Wertheim and H.J. Brasz (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1961): 21–30. 8. Ibid., 219. 9. Schrikker, “Restoration in Java,” 143. Schrikker points to the relevance of researching corruption in a colonial setting for understanding changing normative orders and institutional practices. She refers to “the growing literature on corruption, scandal and public morality in the Netherlands”. 10. The project “Colonial normativity: Corruption and difference in colonial and postcolonial histories of empire and nations: an entangled history of the Netherlands and Indonesia 1870s–2010s” is designed as such a joint programme. It was provided funding by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in 2019 and will be executed by historians of the Vrije

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11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Universiteit Amsterdam and UGM Yogyakarta, with the advice of their international academic networks and several relevant NGOs. See: “Colonial normativity: Corruption and difference in colonial and postcolonial histories of empire and nations: an entangled history of the Netherlands and Indonesia 1870s–2010s”, CLUE + VU, accessed July 20, 2020, https://www.clue.vu.nl/en/projects/colonial-normativity/index.aspx. Ronald Kroeze, André Vitória and Guy Geltner, eds, Anticorruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). For the British case, Dirks has shown similar trends in accusations against the corrupt Governor Warren Hastings. Hastings represented a long tradition of colonial rule in which self-enrichment played a crucial role, and although the attacks on Hastings were framed as anticorruption measures that served the general interest, they were also informed by personal grievances and factional strife. Moreover, in the long run, the attacks served to promote more state control over the revenues of India while the enrichment by the British rulers and the extraction of local resources continued. Nicolas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Hillard von Thiessen, “Korrupte Gesandte? Konkurrierende Normen in Der Diplomatie Der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Korruption. Historische Annäherungen an Eine Grundfigur Politischer Kommunikation, eds. Niels Grüne and Simona Slaniˇcka (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 205–220; Hillard von Thiessen, “Korruption Und Normenkonkurrenz. Zur Funktion Und Wirkung Von Korruptionsvorwürfen Gegen Die Günstling-Minister Lerma Und Buckingham in Spanien Und England Im Frühen 17. Jahrhundert,” in Geld— Geschenke—Politik: Korruption Im Neuzeitlichen Europa, eds. Jens Ivo Engels, Andreas Fahrmeir and Alexander Nützenadel (Munchen: Oldenbourg, 2009), 91–120. Toon Kerkhoff, Ronald Kroeze and Pieter Wagenaar, “Corruption and the Rise of Modern Politics in Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. A Comparison between France, the Netherlands, Germany and England—Introduction,” Journal for Modern European History 11 (2013): 19–30. Remco Raben, “A New Dutch Imperial History?: Perambulations in a Prospective Field,” BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review 128, no. 1 (2013): 5–30; Marieke Bloembergen and Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, eds., “A New Dutch Imperial History Connecting Dutch and Overseas Pasts,” BMGN—Low Countries Historical Review (special issue) 128, no. 1 (2013): 1–5. Raben, “New Dutch Imperial History?,” 10.

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17. Kroeze, Vitória and Geltner, Anticorruption in History; Jens Ivo Engels, Die Geschichte der Korruption. Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2014); F. Monier, O. Dard and A. Fahrmeir, eds., Scandales et corruption à l’époque contemporaine (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014). 18. Cesare Mattina, Frédéric Monier, Olivier Dard and Jens Ivo Engels, eds., Dénoncer la corruption: Chevaliers blancs, pamphlétaires et promoteurs de la transparence à l’époque contemporaine (Paris: Demopolis, 2018). 19. Jens Ivo Engels, “Corruption and Anticorruption in the Era of Modernity and Beyond,” in Anticorruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era, eds. Ronald Kroeze, André Vitória and Guy Geltner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 167–180. 20. See Engels, Die Geschichte der Korruption; Toon Kerkhoff, Ronald Kroeze, Pieter Wagenaar, and Michel Hoenderboom, A History of Dutch Corruption and Public Morality (1648–1940) (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2020). 21. Toon Kerkhoff, “Hidden Morals. Explicit Scandals: Public Values and Political Corruption in the Netherlands (1748–1813)” (PhD diss., Universiteit Leiden, 2012); James Kennedy and Ronald Kroeze, “The Paradox of ‘A High Standard of Public Honesty’: A Long-Term Perspective on Dutch History,” in Anticorruption in History. From Antiquity to the Modern Era, eds. Ronald Kroeze, André Vitória and Guy Geltner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 211–224. 22. René Koekkoek, “Envisioning the Dutch Imperial Nation-State in the Age of Revolutions,” in The Dutch Empire Between Ideas and Practice, 1600–2000, eds. René Koekkoek, Anne-Isabelle Richard and Arthur Weststeijn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 135–157. 23. As cited in Piet Emmer and Jos Gommans, Rijk aan de Rand van de Wereld: de geschiedenis van Nederland overzee 1600–1800 (Amsterdam: Bakker, 2012), 139. 24. Van Zanden and Marks, An Economic History of Indonesia, 30 and 31. See also: Nierstrasz, In the shadow of the company. 25. Hui Kian Kwee has shown how the rules of the “game” were set by the VOC but that the economic success at Java’s North-East coast was based on a “synergy” between VOC representatives and various local elites competing and cooperating for opportunities and power. See: Hui Kian Kwee, The Political Economy of Java’s Northeast Coast. c. 1740– 1800: Elite Synergy (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Hui Kian Kwee, “Chinese Economic Dominance in Southeast Asia: A Longue Durée Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no.1 (January 2013): 5–34. 26. Schrikker, “Restoration in Java,” 134; see also Koh Keng We, who put it this way: “‘a period of fragmentation and decline from the perspective of Dutch Hegemony … this was also a period of opportunity and

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

adjustment for local rulers and elites”. Koh Keng We, “Review-Article: Re-thinking the Colonial Transition: The Case of Java’s Northeast Coast 1740–1850,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (June 2007): 386. Schrikker, “Restoration in Java,” 135. Engels, Der Geschichte der Korruption. Eelkje Poortinga, De scheiding tussen publiek- en privaatrecht bij Johan Rudolph Thorbecke (1798–1872) (Nijmegen: Ars Aequi Libri, 1987). Michael Walzer, “Liberalism and the Art of Separation,” Political Theory 12, no. 3 (August 1984): 315–317. André Steiner, “Corruption in an Anticorruption State? East Germany Under Communist Rule,” in Anticorruption in History. From Antiquity to the Modern Era, eds. Ronald Kroeze, André Vitória and Guy Geltner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 293–304. For a critical reflection, inspired by postcolonial thinking, see: Amy Allen, The End of Progress. Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). William. D. Rubinstein, “The End of ‘Old Corruption’ in Britain 1780– 1860,” Past and Present 101, no. 1 (1983): 55–86. Mary Lindeman, “Dirty Politics or ‘Harmonie’? Defining Corruption in Early Modern Amsterdam and Hamburg,” Journal of Social History 45, no. 3 (2012): 583 and 584. Ibid. Chris te Lintum, Een eeuw van vooruitgang, 1813–1913 (Zutphen: Thieme, 1913), 165; Earlier, James Kennedy and I pointed to this development in Kennedy and Kroeze, “The Paradox.”. Compare the opening sentence of L. P. Hartley in The Go-Between (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953): “The Past Is a Foreign Country; They Do Things Differently There”; and, of course, on “Othering” and “Orientalism”, see Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). Susan Legêne, De bagage van Blomhoff en Van Breugel: Japan, Java, Tripoli en Suriname in de negentiende-eeuwse Nederlandse cultuur van het imperialisme (Amsterdam: Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, 1998). Beatrice de Graaf, Tegen de terreur. Hoe Europa veilig werd na Napoleon (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2018). Schrikker, “Restoration in Java,” 144. Briët, Het proces. Peter Carey, “Revolutionary Europe and the Destruction of Java’s Old Order, 1809–1830”, in: David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 167–188.

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43. Angelie Sens, De kolonieman: Johannes van den Bosch (1780–1844), volksverheffer in naam van de koning (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 2019). 44. Jur van Goor, as cited in Schrikker, “Restoration in Java,” 135. 45. Van Zanden and Marks, Economic History of Indonesia, 47–55. 46. On the existence of different forms of slavery, even after the official abolition of enslavement, see Peter Boomgaard, “Human Capital, Slavery and Low Rates of Economic and Population Growth in Indonesia, 1600–1910,” Slavery & Abolition 24, no. 2 (2003): 83–96; on forced labour and the Cultivation System see: Ulbe Bosma, “The Discourse on Free Labor and the Forced Cultivation System: The Contradictory Consequences of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Colonial Java, 1811–1870,” in Humanitarian Intervention and Changing Labor Relations: The Long-Term Consequences of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, ed. Marcel van der Linden (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011). 47. Van Zanden and Marks, Economic History of Indonesia, 46–72. 48. Sanne Ravensbergen, “Rule of Lawyers: Liberalism and Colonial Judges in Nineteenth-Century Java,” in The Dutch Empire Between Ideas and Practice, 1600–2000, eds. René Koekkoek, Anne-Isabelle Richard and Arthur Weststeijn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 163. 49. Ibid., 165. 50. Kerkhoff, Hidden Morals, 84–89, 117 and 132. 51. With thanks to Maarten Manse, who is finishing a PhD thesis on taxation in the Dutch East Indies. See also Abdul Wahid, “In the shadow of opium. Tax farming and the political economy of colonial extraction in Java, 1807–1911,” in Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development. The Belgian Congo and the Netherlands Indies compared, eds. Ewout Frankema and Frans Buelens (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). 52. David Henley, “Credit and Debt in Indonesian History: An Introduction,” in Credit & Debt in Indonesia, 860–1930: From Peonage to Pawnshop, from Kongsi to Cooperative, eds. David Henley and Peter Boomgaard (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies/Leiden: KITLV Press, 2009), 11–13; Hui Kian Kwee, “Chinese Economic Dominance in Southeast Asia: A Longue Duree Perspective,” Society and History 55, no.1 (January 2013): 5–34. 53. Ravensbergen, “Liberalism and Colonial Judges,” 165 and 166. 54. Raben, “New Imperial History,” 26. 55. Multatuli, Max Havelaar. 56. Tom Phijffer, Het gelijk van Multatuli het handelen van Eduard Douwes Dekker in rechtshistorisch perspectief (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bas Lubberhuizen, 2000). 57. Wim van den Doel, Het Rijk van Insulinde: opkomst en ondergang van een Nederlandse kolonie (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1996) 70, 103 and 104.

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58. Cees Fasseur, De Indologen. Ambtenaren voor de Oost 1825–1950, 3rd ed. (Amsterdam: Aula, 2003), 384–389. 59. G. Termorshuizen, “Busken Huet en ‘het geval Hasselman’ na honderd jaar,” De Gids 132 (1969): 139. 60. Ravensbergen, “Liberalism and Colonial Judges,” 165 and 166. 61. “Beschermende bepalingen tegen knevelarij,” De Locomotief , September 29, 1869, front page. 62. Ibid. 63. Heather Sutherland, The Making of a Bureaucratic Elite: The Colonial Transformation of the Javanese Priyayi (Singapore: Heinemann, 1979), vii. 64. Thomas Lindblad, Foreign Investment in South East Asia (London: Palgrave, 1998) 47 and 48; Van Zanden and Marks, An Economic History of Indonesia, 73. 65. Ibid., 83. 66. Ulbe Bosma, The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia: Industrial Production, 1770–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Adrian Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 16–19; Jan Breman, Koelies, planters en koloniale politiek. Het arbeidsregime op de grootlandbouwondernemingen aan Sumatra’s oostkust in het begin van de twintigste eeuw (Dordrecht: Foris, 1987). 67. One could also take the “Djambi-scandal” of 1921, which was about the favourable and secret conditions upon which concessions were granted— in this case an oil concession to Royal Dutch Shell. The Communist W. Ravesteijn published Het Djambi-schandaal in 1921, which led to questions to be asked in Parliament. In this pamphlet, the following was argued: The Minister of Colonial Affairs and the director of Royal Dutch Shell had secretly cooperated to prevent Standard Oil from obtaining a concession to explore oil fields in the Dutch East Indies. The director of Royal Dutch Shell, Hendrikus Colijn, was also a famous politician and several times minister and prime minister. Communist MPs denounced the corrupt relations between state and big business. See also: Wertheim, “Corruptie”, 220. 68. About this case, I published earlier and in more detail, see: Kroeze, “The Billiton Case (1882–1892)”. 69. Handelingen van de Staten Generaal der Tweede Kamer (Minutes of the Second Chamber of Dutch Parliament, HTK ) May 20, 1892, 1039. 70. Ibid., 1024. Today, one can find a quote of the Billiton Company on their corporate website reading: “Since 1851, we’ve been developing and contributing to industry, communities and economies around the world.” “Our history,” Our approach, BHP Billiton, accessed September 24, 2019, https://www.bhp.com/our-approach/our-history.

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71. Raben, “New Imperial History?,” 10: “As a result, Dutch colonialism has always been dominated by business interests, whether by monopolising trading companies, absentee plantation entrepreneurs, government exploitation or conglomerates of protected private enterprises. The nexus between business and expansion has been crucial in the Dutch case”. 72. Jan Breman, “Het beest aan banden? De koloniale geest aan het begin van de twintigste eeuw,” in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 144, no. 1 (1988): 19–43; Arjan Taselaar, De Nederlandse koloniale lobby: ondernemers en de Indische politiek, 1914–1940 (Leiden: Research School CNWS, School of Asian, African and Amerindian Studies, 1998). 73. These are the words of Howard W. Dick and Vincent J. H. Houben, The Emergence of a National Economy. An Economic History of Indonesia, 1800–2000 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 103. 74. The Rhemrev report is printed and discussed in Breman, Koelies, planters en koloniale politiek. At the time, the report caused debate and led to new accusations, see for example: J. F. Dijkstra, De corruptie in de Nederlandsch-Indische ambtenaarswereld, of: Mr. Rhemrev als regeeringscommissaris door J.F. Dijkstra, Planter (Rotterdam: Masereeuw & Bouten, 1906). See also: Breman, “Het beest aan banden?”; Wertheim, “Corruptie”, 216. 75. Breman, “Het beest aan banden?”. 76. Elsbeth Locher Scholten, Sumatran Sultanate and Colonial State: Jambi and the Rise of Dutch Imperialism, 1830–1907, Studies on Southeast Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2004), 208. 77. Berteke Waaldijk and Susan Legêne, “Ethische politiek in Nederland. Cultureel burgerschap tussen overheersing, opvoeding en afscheid,” in Het koloniale beschavingsoffensief. Wegen naar het nieuwe Indië 1890– 1950, eds. Marieke Bloembergen and Remco Raben (Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij, 2009), 187–216. 78. Cees Fasseur, “Nederland en het Indonesische nationalisme. De balans nog eens opgemaakt,” BMGN- Low Countries Historical Review 99, no. 1 (1984): 28 and 29, note 2; Ibid., 29: “Vergelijk de benadering van het koloniale vraagstuk in het door H.H. van Kol opgestelde ontwerpprogram van de SDAP voor de koloniale politiek (1901): ‘Het behoud onzer koloniën is geen recht maar een plicht geworden. Wij zijn de voogden geworden dier millioenen, wier lot in onze hand is gesteld, (…) door een rechtvaardig en eerlijk bestuur moeten wij hun vertrouwen winnen, hunne welvaart bevorderen… wij moeten het kind opvoeden tot een man. En eenmaal man geworden, zal de Inlander onzer OostIndische koloniën op eigen beenen kunnen staan, de volwassene zal geen steun meer nodig hebben, de rijp geworden vrucht zal afvallen van den boom. Dan, maar ook eerst dan, is het uur zijner volledige autonomie geslagen, dan is onze tijd voorbij, onze taak volbracht…’”.

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79. 80. 81. 82.

83.

84.

85.

86. 87.

Locher Scholten, Sumatran Sultanate, 208. Fasseur, De Indologen, 384–388. Bloembergen, Geschiedenis van de politie. Von Thiessen, Korruption und Normenkonkurrenz, 94–98; Von Thiessen, “Korrupte Gesandte?”; Kerkhoff, Kroeze, Wagenaar and Hoenderboom, A History of Dutch Corruption. Engels, “Corruption and Anticorruption”; Dirk Tänzler, K. Maras, and A. Giannakopoulos, “The German Myth of a Corruption-Free Modern Country,” in eds. Dirk Tänzler, K. Maras and A. Giannakopoulos, The Social Construction of Corruption in Europe (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 87–105; Ronald Kroeze, “The Rediscovery of Corruption in Western Democracies,” in Corruption and Governmental Legitimacy: A Twenty-First Century Perspective, eds. Jonathan Mendilow and Ilan Peleg (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2016). For a critical and postcolonial analysis of progress see: Allen, The end of progress. Frederic Cooper defines “empire” first, as “…a political unit that is large, expansionist (or with memories of an expansionist past), and which reproduces differentiation and inequality among people it incorporates. (…) An empire-state is a structure that reproduces distinctions among collectivities while subordinating them to a greater or lesser degree to the ruling authority”. Second, empire concerns “the making and policing of boundaries, the design of systems of punishment and discipline, the attempt to install awe as well as a sense of belonging in diverse populations”. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question. Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2005), 7 and 30; On imperialism and the politics of difference see also Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). Ibid., 157. The full quote reads: “Colonial rule was empire on the cheap, creating a patchwork of economic exploitation rather than a systematic transformation, ruling through an often ossified system of “tribal” authority rather than trying to create the docile individual subjects of supposedly modern governmentality”. Ravensbergen, “Liberalism and Colonial Judges,” 165 and 166. Compare: Colonialism in Question, 149, where Cooper emphasises the “ambivalence” of modern colonial policy; See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Allen, The End of Progress; Antoinette. M. Burton, ed., “Introduction: The Unfinished Business of Colonial Modernities,” in Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities (London: Routledge, 1999): 1–16.

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88. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 114 and 146. For Cooper, modernisation in the end is about “forward-looking” and a systematic focus on reorganisation of economy and labour, as well as living conditions in cities, industrialisation and urbanisation. It is about “a package of covarying characteristics as markers of progress on the road from stultifying tradition to dynamic modernity”. 89. Ibid., 147. 90. Breman, “Het beest aan banden?,” 28. 91. Strikingly, in 1948, J.S. Furnival—in Colonial policy and practice. A comparative study of Burma and Netherlands India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 269—argued that colonial Burma was more corrupt than colonial Indonesia, concerning the latter corruption was “practically unknown”. As cited in: Wertheim, “Corruptie”, 217. Wertheim himself is not enterally convinced. He suggests that more attention was paid to the problem of corruption in colonial Myanmar than in colonial Indonesia, and the harder one looks, the more one finds (and vice versa). 92. Didier Guignard, L’Abus de pouvoir dans l’Algérie coloniale (1880–1914). Visibilité et singularité. (Nanterre: Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2010). 93. Jonathan Saha, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State. Corruption in Burma ca. 1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 5 and 127. 94. Compare ibid., 9. 95. Compare Burton, “The Unfinished Business of Colonial Modernities.”. 96. Compare Raben, “New Dutch Imperial History?,” 25. 97. Wertheim does mention this topic but states that Indonesian nationalists did not seriously use accusations of corruption as a political weapon to undermine colonialism, suggesting that corruption was not that big of a problem. However, his analysis is brief and his definition of corruption ambivalent. All the more reason for further research into this topic. Werthem, “Corruptie”, 218. 98. His plea was published with the title Indonesia klaagt aan! Pleitrede voor de landraad te Bandoeng gehouden op 2 december 1930, gehouden door ir Soekarno (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1931) and contains references to corruption going back to the VOC. The text is available via: https:// wvi.antenna.nl/nl/ika/index.html. 99. Exposed by people like Hatta and Kartosuwirjo (the founder of the Darul Islam—Indonesian Islamic State) in Indonesian language newspapers, for instance in Fajar Asia, on the lifestyle of the aristocracies, such as the Sunan of Surakarta. I would like to thank Dr. Farabi Fakih for these suggestions. 100. Soerabaijasch Handelsblad, February 27, 1934: “de Regeering wil de oude toestanden doen terugkeeren, waardoor de ambtenaren naar willekeur kunnen handelen en corruptie weer mogelijk wordt”.

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101. Farabi Fakih, “The Rise of the Managerial State in Indonesia. Institutional Transition During the Early Independence Period” (PhD diss., Universiteit Leiden, 2014), 175 and 179. 102. Bambang Purwanto, “Entertain People, Accumulate Capital: Indonesian Military Entrepreneurship in the 1950s and 1960s,” in Promises and Predicaments: Trade and Entrepreneurship in Colonial and Independent Indonesia in the 19th and 20th Centuries, eds. Alicia Schrikker and Jeroen Touwen (Singapore: NUS Press, 2015): 151–162; Bambang Purwanto, “Economic Decolonization and the Rise of Indonesian Military Business,” in Indonesian Economic Decolonization in Regional Perspective, eds. Thomas Lindblad and Peter Post (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2009): 39–58. 103. Staffan Andersson and Paul Heywood, “The Politics of Perception: Use and Abuse of Transparency International’s Approach to Measuring Corruption.” Political Studies 57, no. 4 (2009): 746–767; A.T. Paul, “Korruption als Europaische Erbe?.” Geld—Geschenke—Politik: Korruption Im Neuzeitlichen Europa. Historisch Zeitschrift, eds. Jens Ivo Engels, Andreas Fahrmeir and Alexander Nützenadel (Munchen: Oldenbourg, 2009): 275–306. 104. For the Dutch–Indonesian relationship the question is sometimes raised but not really discussed. For the British–Nigerian relationship there seems to be a more lively debate about corruption and colonialism. Hadassah Egbedi, “By ignoring corruption’s colonial roots, Cameron’s summit was destined to fail,” The Guardian, May 13, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/13/ignoringcorruptions-colonial-roots-camerons-summit-was-destined-to-fail; Steven Pierce, “Looking Like a State: Colonialism and the Discourse of Corruption in Northern Nigeria”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 4 (2006): 887–914; Luis Angeles and Kyriakos C. Neanidisy, “Colonialism, Elite Formation and Corruption.” SIRE Discussion Papers, Scottish Institute for Research in Economics (SIRE) 51 (2010); See also: Daron Acemoglu, S. Johnson and James A. Robinson, “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,” American Economic Review 91 no. 5 (2001): 1369–1401. 105. Susan Legêne, “The European Character of the Intellectual History of Dutch Empire.” BMGN/ Low Countries Historical Review 132, no. 2 (2017): 110–120; Susan Legêne, Bambang Purwanto and Henk G.C. Schulte Nordholt, eds., Sites, Bodies and Stories. Imagining Indonesian History (Singapore: NUS Press, 2015).

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CHAPTER 8

Land, State and Favour in Colonial Algeria: Why the Bruat Case (1877) Did Not Become a Scandal Didier Guignard

Introduction By sharing the new approach on corruption beyond Europe—as defended by Ronald Kroeze, Pol Dalmau and Frédéric Monier in their introduction—we first asked whether only one case, that went completely unnoticed in France and Algeria in the 1870s, could provide enough material and perspective. Upon reflection, we do believe it does. Like examples of greater size and resonance—e.g. the Hastings scandal of 1788 or the Billiton affair of 1882–1893 (discussed in Chapters 5 and 6)—the Bruat case allows us to articulate corruption as a contextualised practice within contemporary discourse, although in a much more discrete and implied manner. The practice corresponds here with illegal appropriation of indigenous fertile land with the help, and for the benefit, of officials. Of course, in

D. Guignard (B) IREMAM, CNRS - Université d’Aix Marseille, Marseille, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Kroeze et al. (eds.), Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era, Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9_8

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Algeria like in other long-term colonies, it can be a case of not seeing the forest for the trees since most of the land seized by European or Japanese states, companies and individuals from the sixteenth into the twentieth centuries, were done according to their own legal proceedings or regularised afterwards.1 In addition, land redistribution to public servants has been a legal practice for a long time, from colonial Ireland to the Americas between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, when it was widely and openly dedicated to soldiers, officials and churches.2 However, liberal ideology around 1800 redefined what might be economic, political and moral priorities for colonial states as well as European settlements. In such contexts, land granting in the colonised world was gradually reserved to “real” farmers or investors, i.e. private and full-time activities that were found to be incompatible with offices, unless they were elected. Thus, the degree to which in late nineteenth-century Algeria such a prohibition could be subverted in both words and actions is interesting: the Bruat case emphasises specific characteristics and evolutions of a colony compared (as well as connected) with the metropolis, other colonies or empires. The focus is also an appeal to historians to pay more attention to written traces, discovered by accident, when they highlight moments of relative silence on corruption. Not only because these instances are by far the most common, but also because these kinds of materials are not produced in the wake of later scandals while looking back in time. The Bruat case reveals in situ ordinary ways of preserving discretion or enjoying impunity for dominant agents of corruption, like hopeless strategies used by subalterns who suffered and tried to mitigate its effects. The anti-corruption rhetoric was not on the French agenda at that time, except to deplore and racialise an indigenous frame of mind, as Anubha Anushee and Tanja Bührer show for British India in earlier times. Nevertheless, the Bruat case offers a complete observation site on illegal cronyism with all the players concerned, be it colonisers or colonised, public or private agents, men, women and even children. We know that silence is never absolute when archives are produced or controlled by colonial powers; as Ann Laura Stoler points out, a wide range of facts, emotions and opinions can slip away from a careful reading of the documents.3 The reduced ramifications of the Bruat case is a further advantage that helps us to consider it in its entirety. That does not prevent treating it as a more structural phenomenon over a longer period, in order to

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better understand what it can ultimately tell us about colonial corruption from a global perspective. The favour did not only cross the sea, but also brought together players whose interests and environments were very different. We keep in mind Arjun Appadurai’s advice when he writes that the “production of locality” is always embedded with larger factors that can be “themselves articulated in variable, puzzling, sometimes contradictory ways that depend on the cultural, class, historical, and ecological setting within which they come together”.4 Certainly for the period under review, denouncing corruption was not essential for dispossessed Algerians. The word usually did not belong to their registers of language, unless their claims could be translated and biased in the language of public writers, and thus into that of French rulers with (or without) their knowledge or consent. Even then, uses of the word corruption reflected more, in the 1870s, a barely audible discourse inside parts of the dominant power. However, its lasting inefficiency did not prevent subalterns from being conscious that it would be the only way to be heard one day.

The Discovery of the Bruat Case (1877) On April 1877, Adélaïde Bruat, a 69-year-old middle-class widow who was living in Amiens (North of France), without any intention to leave her city, wrote to Alfred Chanzy, General Governor of Algeria (1873– 1879), asking him for a “100 hectares farm plot [lot de ferme]”. She knew perfectly well its localisation on a cadastral map, 60 kilometres east of Algiers, and promised “to clear it and to make it suitable for cereal culture within six months after its acquisition”. She was ready to spend up to 15,000 francs for “a mansion, depots and warehouses […] [i.e. all] indispensable buildings for a serious farm”.5 She also reminded the senior official that her husband died in the colony where they had lived for 35 years, and where he had created two important farms in the Mitidja plain, near Algiers, without demanding any concession from the state. “If you take into consideration”, she insisted, “the services rendered to France by my brother-in-law, Admiral Bruat, fleet commander during the Crimean war, [and] those of my [second] son [Émile] […] who was at the head of a division during the war against Prussia and the siege of Paris, I have good hope that you will respond to my demand favourably”. Indeed, Governor General Chanzy added this commentary in the margin for his subordinates: “Lady Bruat deserves all our attention. […] Her wish […] is to make her [eldest] son [Edmond, 51 years old]

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manager of the concession [so he] would give his dismissal from functions he fulfils in the administration”. As a local civil servant in Algeria since the end of the 1850s, Edmond Bruat was appointed a few kilometres from the land he claimed through his mother,6 thus he had sufficient time to choose the exact place during land seizure operations, of which he was partly in charge after the great indigenous revolt of 1871. Then, the decision did not take long; in October 1877, Lady Bruat was recognised concessionaire by French authorities—a right she transferred to her son as soon as he obtained early retirement for medical reasons (a better solution, financially speaking, than a resignation). After a legal period of three years residence on site and appraisal expenditures validated by inspectors, Edmond Bruat became full owner in January 1881.7 This case did not come to our attention in light of a public scandal simply because such an event did not happen. In reality, we found this example indirectly. Our actual research is a long-term (1870s to 1990s) micro-historical analysis of the interpersonal relationships and spatial occupation specifically on that farm, and in its immediate neighbourhood. The place became an obvious choice after the discovery of a 90-page judicial document from 1934: an investigation into the homicide of an indigenous worker by a European foreman, providing family names and locations, as well as detailed ingredients of everyday life beyond violence.8 On the 1:50.000 scale map, first edited in 1884 and revised in 1936, the site is mentioned—with a spelling error—as the “Bruet farm” (Fig. 8.1), even though Edmond and his eventual heirs were not owners anymore. This information was sufficient to go back in time, using reports on local implementation of land confiscations in the 1870s, inspections on concessions afterwards and personal files of civil servants. In other words, only records not disclosed publicly at that time but providing a clear picture of conditions under which land appropriation originally occurred. The discovery of these conditions was not a big surprise. Since the beginning of French occupation in the 1830s, public agents were playing a key role in the “land rush”9 ; therefore favours, insider trading and satisfaction of private or political interests were common in the process, in spite of all rules against speculation, cronyism or officials’ accumulation of wealth. Such practices became materials for scandals only in the 1890s, when Parliament’s attention coincided with French local opponents’ expectations of denouncing misuses of power within the colony.10 Thus, the Bruat case is interesting for more than one reason. It reveals the crucial role of the state for land reallocations in colonial Algeria. That

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Fig. 8.1 The “Bruet [i.e. Bruat] farm” on the 1:50.000 scale map (Document source: Institut géographique de France, sheet no. 43 entitled “Palestro”, 1958 edition last updated in 1936 with vines’ extension in scatter plots)

distinguishes it from settlement frontiers elsewhere in the world at the same time, whether that be North America, South Africa or Australia, where private initiatives of squatters and land hunters used to precede public recognition of ownership.11 The Algerian situation more closely resembles that of the Dutch East Indies, where all the land was appropriated by the state before concessions to private entrepreneurship. As Ronald Kroeze highlights in his chapter, this cultivation system was criticised in the Netherlands as early as the 1850s, on the basis that the Dutch administration was granting plantations to “friends”. These kinds of critics also existed in France regarding concessions of major railway or urban operations in the metropolis,12 but they paid less attention overseas, ceasing completely after 1870 with the regime fall due to the defeat against Prussia. Nevertheless, allocation by rank in the Bruat case—and even more in favour of a civil servant—recalled the legacy of the Ancient Régime.13 This was not only the case for the French state reformers following the 1789 revolution, but also for their Dutch, Spanish or British contemporaries. There was a determination—throughout the nineteenth

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century, with more or less resonance in their respective countries—to stop all forms of privileges or patronage by clearly separating public and private interests both at home like overseas, as Gemma Rubí, Pol Dalmau or Anubha Anushree also underline in their contributions. Yet this long-term discourse had real impact on the field. In late nineteenth-century Algeria, the confusion between public and private spheres for land allocations did not reach the same extent as in Ireland or Latin America during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, when it was part of an official policy. In the post-revolution era, French liberal elites in the metropolis used to consider Algeria—when its conquest increased in the 1840s—as a new experimental field. It was argued that small plots delivered to or, even better, bought by true European farmers were the only moral and economical way to proceed, modelled on the Antic Roma, the modern United States or British colonies.14 Even the young independent republics in South America could become an example to follow, according to European travellers in the first half of the nineteenth century, as Moisés Prieto points out in his chapter. In the 1870s the French government moved from words to actions, introducing all legal tools in Algeria to appropriate indigenous fertile lands for European migrants and real settlers. Thus, the kind of favour Edmond Bruat enjoyed in 1877 seems to really be an anachronistic one, already condemned by French opinion makers and successive regimes for decades. The shared purpose was to imitate in Algeria what has been implemented for a longer period in other settler colonies, which were generally thought to be, by liberal elites, a source of prosperity and greatness.15 One might expect more discretion from the protagonists of the Bruat case at least, but surprisingly enough the favour in question was openly claimed by the applicants, and agreed by the higher authorities without excessive precautions—as if the process was normal. As if there was nothing to fear for during that period of time. Why?

The Enduring Usefulness of Relations Under the New Regime What strikes first in the patronages claimed by Lady Bruat is that they all belonged to the Second Empire (1852–1870). Nevertheless the “black legend” of the fallen regime reached its peak after the defeat against Prussia and the advent of the Third Republic.16 In Algeria, the elected

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representatives of the French minority took advantage of the situation to put the “régime du sabre” (i.e. military administration before 1870) on trial. Their republicanism meant the development of a civil administration but, above all, a new phase of land settlements that the timely 1871 repression against indigenous “rebels” offered. Sequestrations and expropriations were used on an unprecedented scale in the 1870s, supplemented by the 1873 Warnier Act that increased cadastral reform and legal francisation of properties. In other words: the land market opening to European interests.17 However, this republican policy preferred small plots in owner occupation—generally twenty to 30 hectares—in order to populate rural areas with European families. It took distance with big farming estates managed by capitalist companies, which were previously experienced by Napoleon III. Although the emperor imposed specifications on them, including installation of European tenants, these clauses were not respected most of the time.18 Thus, Lady Bruat’s demand took place in both contexts: the new one that was generating growing opportunities for land concessions, and the old one referring to the plot size she demanded (100 hectares, i.e. the maximum at that time), the way she considered its development and the patronages she claimed to obtain it. Indeed, she and her son were perfectly aware they still had a good chance of obtaining the favour, firstly because of the powerful force of patriotism.19 They invoked the memory of Admiral Armand Bruat (1796–1855), a heroic figure who served several political regimes. He contributed to the success of the French landing near Algiers in 1830, informing his superiors about Ottoman forces while he still was their prisoner. As a fleet commander during the Crimean war, he distinguished himself with a bold expedition in the Azov Sea and the capture of the Ukrainian harbour Kinburn (1855), just before dying of cholera.20 In 1864, Auguste Bartholdi built a monument for him in the Alsatian city of Colmar—a sensitive location of memory after German annexation of the region in 1871. The other family hero was the second son of Lady Bruat, Émile (1828–1874), who was also a veteran of the Crimean and Italian wars. After that, he had been a loyal supporter of the young republic as a division commander of Léon Gambetta’s Loire army in January 1871; he also took part in the repression of the Paris Commune a few weeks later.21 The 1871 trauma, France’s defeat against Prussia, plus insurrections in Paris and Algeria the same year, gave greater prominence to patriotic feelings of the more glorious memories of the 1850s, i.e. the Crimean and Italian campaigns and the successful end of the conquest of Algeria.

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It is also worth noting that in 1877 Lady Bruat preferred to refer to her youngest son and to her brother-in-law rather than to the latter’s wife, Caroline Peytavin d’Aulx, Governess of the Children of France (1856-1870). This royal title, reintroduced by Napoleon I in 1810, gave her access to monarchs’ privacy and precedence at the imperial court,22 which is why Edmond Bruat did not neglect his aunt’s recommendation letters in the 1860s in order to advance his career.23 However, a decade later this patronage was too closely associated with the Ancient Régime to invoke it further. Nevertheless, if the Bruat name still meant something in the 1870s, it was also because ruling elites had not changed completely since the advent of the new regime. Governor General Alfred Chanzy, who followed up Lady Bruat’s letter, built most of his military career during the Second Empire with the continuing support of Marshal Patrice de Mac-Mahon, another hero of the Crimean war and an important predecessor as Governor General of Algeria (1861–1870). This eminent monarchist was even now President of the Republic (1873– 1879), elected by the conservative majority in Parliament. The real breaking point occurred only between 1877 and 1879, when liberal republicans succeeded in obtaining all leading institutions of the so-called republic. It is not certain whether or not Bruat’s demand would have enjoyed the same favour after this period. In that case, however, recommendations could have benefitted someone else. Indeed, intercessions by French republican elites to obtain public posts or land plots in Algeria, for electors or relatives, had nothing to envy of conservative ones, and the example came from on high. Alfred Chanzy’s successor, Albert Grévy, compounded his lucrative charge of governor general of the colony (1879–1881), with that of permanent senator—both of which he obtained from his brother Jules Grévy, new President of the Republic (1879–1887). With another brother Paul, also senator, and Jules Grévy’s son-in-law Daniel Wilson MP, as well as under-secretary of state for finances at the same period, “Mister Brother” established “a real synergies pole between central power and private interests”,24 especially in Algeria and Tunisia after this latter country became a French protectorate in 1881. They found support locally from Oran and Constantine MPs Eugène Étienne and Gaston Thomson, who were pillars of the republican regime and Wilson’s direct friends. In such a context, land reallocations in colonial Maghreb were continuing to depend on favouritism. For example, a decree in 1878 obliged the

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reservation of two-thirds of land plots to be conceded in Algeria to European immigrants, although these new settlers represented only 43% of the 13,300 families receiving concessions between 1871 and 1895.25 As proximity was key, those already installed in the colony had more chances to obtain political support in order to become (greater) owners. In comparison, at the same time, Pol Dalmau and Gemma Rubí remind us that it was better to request a patronage before leaving Spain in order to become rich in Cuba as a public officer. In Algeria, the difference was due to the fiction of territorial continuity with the metropolis, on behalf of which the same political organisation was reproduced in the colony for a minority of citizens; that drastically increased the strength of local cronyism.26

An Easier Confusion of Public and Private Interests in the Colony If recommendations for civil servants were also the norm in metropolitan France until the decision to introduce a statute for them in 1946,27 land reallocations in the colonial context added further temptation as the greatest resource for cronyism and the easiest way to get rich quick.28 However, the Bruat case not only combined both, it represented a more serious transgression for that time because recommending a civil servant through his mother to obtain land concession, with full knowledge and consent from each side, was contrary to the most established rules in the colony. As early as March 1834, a ministerial direction banned any property acquisition by military or civil servants in Algeria, and the prohibition was reaffirmed by the order of 1 October 1844. This regulation was then relaxed by a governor general’s decision in May 1848 that authorised officials to buy real estate in order to facilitate their settlement. However, the next legislative material tended to restrict that right, especially within districts they were administering.29 Obviously, full prohibition continued for land concessions intended for real settlers or investors. In any case, obligations of residence plus appraisal expenditures meant a selection of candidates and then inspections of concessions, which normally ruled officials out. For example, in 1872 Governor General Louis-Henri de Gueydon took offence to discovering a civil engineer and a retired battalion chief (even if the latter formally had the right to apply) among candidates for land concessions. The first one tried to hide his real occupation, describing himself as a “cultivator”, “mason” and “carpenter”.30

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Nonetheless, a few years later, Edmond Bruat went further as he did not even obscure his real intentions or activities. If he was required to leave administration before being recognised as a concessionary, he refused to depart, and his early retirement for medical reasons (whether true or false) should have scuttled his claim, as did a more rigorous examination of his personal file. On the other hand, as Jonathan Saha points out in his chapter, even when the legal framework is clearly in place, historians must pay attention not only to breaches of the rules, but also to officials’ tolerance of or complicity with certain violations. Only a strong sense of protection and impunity could explain Edmond Bruat’s presumption. He occupied different positions in the colony as a local administrator (commissaire civil ) from Saint-Denis-du-Sig (1859–1860), a small European centre in the western department of Oran where he began his career at the late age of 33, to bigger districts closer to Algiers where his parents lived: Cherchell (1860–1862), Aumale (1862–1864) and Orléansville (1864– 1870). He served a short term as a first-class senior clerk at the prefecture of Algiers (1870–1872) for which this graduate in law, fluent in English and Arabic, was certainly more qualified for. However, his next assignments were not easy as they included isolated Kabyle stations in the wake of the 1871 revolt: Palestro (1872–1873) where the memory of a European massacre still haunted the place, El Arrouch (1873–1874), Bordj Menaiel (1874–1875) and Dra el Mizan (1875–1877) with obligations of horse inspections in the surrounding mountains.31 Although a steady progression, throughout his entire career Edmond Bruat did not seem very satisfied with his daily duties and annual salary (from 1800 to 4500 francs). He used to take advantage of his skilful use of dialects to “neglect his office and socialize with merchants”, lending money to indigenous locals who repaid him with cereals which were then resold to millers,32 or personally cashing in fines imposed on indigenous people.33 “His attention [still] proved deficient” in the 1870s, while his “unauthorised absences” were continuing for the sake of “commercial relations” with local communities.34 Beyond personal enrichment, this was precisely the kind of interethnic closeness his superiors could not tolerate from a representative of the supposed superior racial order. However, what could become public charges of cultural and economic corruption went no further at that time, unlike those tackling certain British officials earlier in India as Tanja Bührer or Anubha Anushree discuss in their chapters. Edmond Bruat was indeed protected by powerful

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relatives and, with the insurance of impunity, he could even be “a little abrupt […] irascible […] rude” with his subordinates, i.e. particularly violent in administrative language.35 Yet this kind of profile was nothing exceptional. It corresponds with the group portrait of prefectoral staff in Algeria at the end of the nineteenth century, which Edmond Bruat could have joined before the end of his career.36 This administrative body was generally hosting less competent or evaluated officials coming from the metropolis, or civil servants having spent the greater part of their service within the colony. Both profiles usually did not find their advancement rapid enough and easily gave way to compromise, discouragement or violence. In comparison with the majority of his colleagues, Edmond Bruat graduated higher, but this could also be a source of frustration and, in his particular case, his knowledge of law and languages mainly served him for the purpose of private profit. Such a deviancy also referred to control weaknesses in a colony where districts were always larger, more populated and difficult to reach than in the metropolis. A chronic under-administration, which offered many opportunities for representatives of the law to transgress it, especially as they could already use or misuse exorbitant legal powers over indigenous people, such as imposing fines or days in jail for specific infractions, without any judgement.37 This kind of delinquency, boosted by weaknesses of control mechanisms and transfers of extensive power in the hands of a few, was very common in colonial contexts, for example as Jonathan Saha reveals about forest rangers’ behaviour in Burma in the 1930s. Similarly, in late nineteenth-century Algeria, French officials were operating in a very specific environment that encouraged them to exceed limits, even those fixed by their contemporaries.

An Officer Well-Informed About Land Reallocations However substantial differences remained between settler colonies. In nineteenth-century North America, South Africa or Australia the authorities were used to regularise situations created by squatters or land hunters’ private initiatives, in the context of massive European migration overwhelming indigenous peoples.38 The situation was exactly the opposite in Algeria, where fertile land was less extensive, indigenous population densities higher, military conquest harder and longer and deadly fevers

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wider-spread. Thus, European migrants were much more difficult to attract in comparison. For this reason, the French state played a decisive role to incite, prepare and finance land transfers from indigenous hands to European ones, via the public domain most of the time.39 Under the Second Empire, Napoleon III refused to continue this expensive policy for state finances that failed to meet the prescribed goals while weakening French domination in front of warring tribes.40 The “Arabic kingdom” policy in the 1860s was precisely an attempt to conciliate liberal ideals with consolidation of the conquest, by giving priority to land sales instead of free concessions with the notable exception of big tenders to capitalistic interests. In that case, their specifications were to expend themselves for infrastructures, to instal European tenants or to employ an indigenous working force.41 Settlers’ representatives were fully against such an orientation that was limiting their electors’ land access, as well as their role in plot distribution. They pushed hard after the regime fall for a severe punishment of the revolting tribes via land sequestration and expropriation. These confiscations returned to them (as well as to civil servants) a key role in the reallocation of nearly 500,000 hectares in the 1870s.42 Therefore, in 1877 Lady Bruat linked her demand of a farm plot to this evolving legitimation that was seeking to hide the persistence of state obtrusion in the “land rush”, by invoking liberal ideals. She recalled to the governor general that her husband created two important farms on his own before she asked for a land concession the first time, with the resolute intention to expend nearly 15,000 francs—to put it in terms of financial value. By doing so, above all, she was complying to the decree of 15 July 1874 accepting exemptions of obligation of residence, if candidates to farm plots were committed to installing at least one European family on them (i.e. at least five adults per 100 hectares), as well as to expend a minimum of 150 francs per hectare (one-third of which in buildings). This was further proof of the difficulty to conciliate European poor migration with substantial investment in the colony. At the same time, the insistence of Lady Bruat to refer to her husband as a purely private entrepreneur is an interesting argument, although the facts say otherwise. Like many others, Antoine Bruat (1793–1876) invested in Algeria from the 1840s onwards, following the advancing troops, taking advantage of the first land sequestrations imposed on France “enemies”.43 Despite financial risks caused by the lack of guarantees in French law, he benefitted from colonial state reforms that transformed European purchases of perpetual annuities (i.e. anā contracts,

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very common in Muslim law and Ottoman Algeria) into full ownership.44 In this way, he obtained several hundred hectares at a reduced price in the Mitidja plain, plus urban properties in Algiers and in the small town of Medea.45 In the 1850s, the military commander of the Djidjelli district on the east coast authorised him to build a watermill inland. The region was neither already safe nor registered, but Antoine Bruat increased “successive land encroachments [around the mill] that generated serious protest from Kabyle owners”.46 Finally, French authorities advised him to abandon the place for security reasons, although as a compensation they offered him 800 hectares of concessions near Constantine, which he accepted promptly.47 He could then manage his properties’ annuities—until his death—from his apartment, located on Isly Street in the upscale European heart of downtown Algiers.48 It was likely that such a paternal business, at the crossroads of private rent-seeking and public opportunities, influenced his son Edmond, especially since the latter was on the front line of implementing land confiscations. His first duty in 1872, in the Beni Khalfoun tribal district near Palestro, was to inform central administration about their participation and leadership in the 1871 “rebellion”. The governor general needed these details to justify “collective” or stricter “nominative” penalties via sequestration. However, Edmond’s superiors were not very happy with his survey, although they recognised it presented “specific difficulties because of the deep-set disturbances the insurrection had provoked” in those isolated mountains, from which several murderers of Europeans had descended.49 Two years later he was in charge of an adjacent district near Bordj Menaiel where, this time, security was back and land resources in the Isser plain much more attractive. As a member of the local sequestration commission, he had to confirm or rectify previous information on indigenous responsibilities, to delimit European perimeters, and to match confiscated or complementary expropriated areas within the new settlement cadastre. His zeal was much higher, so he could point out in a report that “this territory [was] well known to [him]”.50 What superiors confirmed soon: “Mister Bruat is managing sequestration affairs with activity and intelligence”.51 As the site that would become the Bruat farm was only three kilometres south of Bordj Menaiel, the place of his residence, he himself could inspect this accessible land—which was of very good quality—and anticipate its annexation to the public domain before anyone else. If insider dealing was common in settlement perimeters,

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this was defined only in 1967 as an infraction in French business law.52 Edmond Bruat could have been qualified as a “chocolatero” if he had served in Spanish Cuba (see contributions by Pol Dalmau and Gemma Rubí), but this kind of public denunciation was not in use in Algeria at that time.

Instead of a Scandal: The Small Anti-corruption Voice of the Ben Zoubirs Certainly, the gathered information and the existing colonial law were already sufficient to legally prevent a civil servant benefitting from land concession through a nominee. Liberal and republican representatives could take offence to a practice that completely contradicted their preferences for European settlement with selected families in owner occupations. In 1871, widespread patriotic feelings also encouraged French Parliament to take the decision to reserve 100,000 hectares of land concessions in Algeria for Alsatian-Lorrain refugees refusing German nationality. However, in order to erupt scandals need not only public information that delinquency does exist, but also that such information meets dominant representations against it.53 Definitively, it would take some time before this concomitance would be achieved. The “land rush” trial was still impossible in the years around 1880 because large-scale sequestration was absolutely not a debate for MPs in the wake of the 1871 trauma. At the same time, French patriots could easily forgive the wrongdoings by individuals sharing the surname of national heroes. Usual liberal critics against state concessions were also moderate if they enabled private investors to modernise the colonial economy, as under the Second Empire. For their part, radicals opposed to land concentration were ready to accept a few 100 hectares of farm plots as maximum size, if those exceptions would benefit poorer European families as tenants. Even conservative leaders could approve such a mutation of land policy without revolution, especially if there were some prominent families among the beneficiaries. Lastly, the Bruat case revealed the common practice of recommendations, and a formal compliance with the law which were no longer matters for a public controversy. Nearly fifteen years later, this kind of material would be transformed into “Algerian scandals”, as headlines in local and national press showed.54 Beyond technical and political circumstances allowing these information flows, a major source of indignation within French public

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opinion was not that indigenous land was confiscated, but the failure of many European settlements in spite of all “public” resources which had been monopolised by a few. This assertion would begin to bear fruit in the context of a persistent world-wide economic crisis and failing confidence in a republican regime, only governed by liberals (at least until 1899). At this stage, indigenous plaints and local revolts motivated by property rights’ violations, and especially those caused by elected or appointed officials, would start to emerge, often manipulated by French candidates to local or central power. That is what happened, for instance, upstream to the Beni Urjin scandal (1891) or with the Margueritte affair (1901).55 Both cases highlight the plight of indigenous peoples that were completely deprived of their “collective property”, i.e. the last pieces of land French authorities had recognised as belonging to them in this new legal form a few years before. Nonetheless, in the aftermath of the 1871 revolt, subaltern voices could not be traced as easily from the above scandals. Moreover, we reach their small echo through the prism of public writers using appropriate registers of language for local authorities. Under such conditions, denouncing the sequestration or expropriation principle—some illegal or immoral practices associated with it—was simply not an option. It is then interesting to follow how the Ben Zoubir family attempted to appeal for the loss of their property. On a French local plan that just preceded the drawing of the cadastral map, we can read their name joined to the toponym “arib” on the exact location of the future Bruat farm (Fig. 8.2). In fact, the cartographer recorded improperly the word “azib” (to be pronounced azīb in Maghreb Arabic), which meant a spring or an autumn-hard standing campsite for the ploughing season. Only one year later, this toponym and the ground track had already disappeared while Bruat’s name began to surface, added with a pencil on the reserved farm plot (Fig. 8.3). However, the Ben Zoubir name was still present in local memories. Ahmed ben Ali ben Zoubir was a “trustworthy man” (am¯ın), i.e. an honourable representative of the local tribal clan of the Beni Mekla. He played a major role in the 1871 insurrection commanding the assault and sacking of Bordj Menaiel, the nearest settler village, as well as that of a neighbouring caravanserai belonging to an indigenous family who were loyal to the French.56 After military repression, he and his family suffered legal punishment more than others; Ahmed was sentenced to five years in prison and all family possessions were sequestered.57

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Fig. 8.2 The “arib [i.e. azib] ben Zoubir” on a 1:40.000 civil engineer plan, October 1876 (Document source: ANOM, DA, 4 M/241)

Contrary to international law’s developments since the beginning of the nineteenth century, French authorities adopted a very archaic form of confiscation against indigenous “rebels”. It seemed to be a reactivation of the medieval English doctrine of “corruption of blood” that allowed the sovereign to confiscate all “felons” or “traitors”’ assets, but also to prevent their heirs from inheriting them on the basis of their shared human nature to do evil.58 It was intended as a collective and definitive sanction designed to be “horrible” and that outraged the great jurist William Blackstone as early as the 1760s.59 In the second half of the eighteenth century, western legal standards began to promote the individualisation of penalties definitively in metropolitan France after 1814. If the “corruption of blood” concept was still followed by the North American “patriots” against “loyalists” to the British Crown during the Independence war (1776–1783), the US Congress refused to adopt it again less than a century later against “secessionists”.60 The last and only

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Fig. 8.3 The farm plot [“ferme”] with the Bruat name mentioned below on the 1:10.000 cadastral plan, August 1877 (Document source: ANOM, DA, 4 M/241)

time it was implemented on a large scale during the nineteenth century was for the colonial repression of the Maori revolts in the 1860s. This example perhaps inspired French rulers in colonial Algeria, although the British government definitively abolished such a principle in its legislation in 1870.61 However, in French Algeria, when the sequestration was “nominal”, as was the case for all insurrection “leaders”, there was no distinction between the sanctioned owner, his co-owners (indigenous assets being undivided most of the time) and all of their heirs. In this spiteful ambience, the discourse on corruption was—more than ever—a monopoly for colonial power without any possible discordant voice. Rarely used at that time, this word could only qualify an indigenous cultural heritage to do evil, but in no way an illegal or immoral method to seize land. As a local military officer expressed, it was useless to differentiate the responsibilities in the revolt because all indigenous people “were in perfect complicity with the rebels who are, by the way, their brothers, parents or friends”.62

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No doubt that the Ben Zoubir family members ignored the backstage games deployed by Edmond Bruat and the technicalities of French law forbidding the favour he enjoyed in 1877. By contrast, they certainly knew this district officer, his repetitive visits to their land to appreciate its value, the fact that he left his functions to become the new owner. Their sense of injustice could hardly target a favour distributed or reached by a powerful man (k¯ abir in Arabic). That was one of the most solidly rooted norms in Maghreb societies even if, as victims, they could not accept it so easily. Muslim law or local customs also practised the confiscation of assets, but usually restricted its use to apostates or murderers.63 Above all, provisions could prevent or limit its impact on family members by the possible recourse to charitable donations (waqf ), guaranteeing the rights of a lineage, or by the payment of compensation (diya) to a victim’s family. Obviously, all these references were useless in the face of massive French punishment, i.e. nominative and collective sequestrations which affected nearly 800,000 Algerians in the 1870s—one-third of the population!64 However, Xavier Huetz de Lemps is right when he warns us in his chapter against the temptation to approach culture as a fixed and essentialised pattern. After 40 years of colonial presence, Algerian notables had time to resist by means other than weapons, absorbing parts of French administrative procedure and legal culture, helping them to formulate claims with the expected words. In her contribution, Tanja Bührer introduces us to Gholam Hoseyn Kh¯an whose written critique against British East India Company governance in Bengal, a century before, used the same arguments as Edmund Burke in Parliament. Certainly, as employees in the Mughal government in Delhi, Kh¯an family members were better prepared than the Ben Zoubirs to borrow from others. However, if the latter were illiterate (both in French and Arabic) and therefore needed a public letter writing service, they proved a similar capacity for pointing at a sanction affecting innocents aside from jeopardising their own survival. It was—no more, no less—an open criticism of the “corruption of blood” doctrine. Although such legal words were never used in their letters, they were ready to carry this line of defence for decades, being aware that it could become a weak point on the French side, and thus hoping to be heard with time. Then Ahmed ben Zoubir’s nephew, Suleiman, was the first family member to claim a land compensation in 1875, for himself, his sister and brother, arguing that although his father Moussa died in times

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of famine, ten years earlier, “all family [and undivided] assets had been placed under sequestration, without bothering about the distinction to be made in favour of Moussa’s minor children”.65 We do not know what fate was finally made regarding his demand, which was at first postponed by the authorities until the end of seizure operations. In turn, from his prison as well as after his release, his uncle Ahmed took the lead to defend his ten children’s interests. As he argued, he left them “in grave deprivation although they were innocent for the fault [he admitted to having] committed”.66 All these letters were sent to the Prefect or to the governor general, and formulated in appropriate terms. As they proved to be insufficient, Ahmed ben Zoubir himself volunteered to serve as a conveyor chief during the French expedition in Madagascar (1895), where he died like many of his fellow indigenous countrymen.67 Finally, his children received a small five hectares in compensation outside of the settlement perimeter, at the expense of other indigenous occupants.68 This official decision was taken in 1898 at a time when repeated “Algerian scandals” were allowed a better listening from the authorities. Nonetheless, as this indemnity was far from achieving the value of Ahmed ben Zoubir original possessions (not only in full ownership but also in various land gages), his children remained active, for twenty years, to purchase parcels outside of the European area and formerly held by their father as a mortgage lender (murtahin). They even claimed to repay the loans to the public domain depository of these specific rights since the 1870s, in order to become full owners.69

Conclusion The Bruat case is not only an open window on growing “corruption facilitators”70 in late nineteenth-century colonial Algeria. It reveals a pivotal moment when French leaders and opinion makers were still accepting different ways to colonise or, at least, a few exceptions to the priority given to European migrants and real settlers. Obviously, indigenous individuals and communities had no place in this all-French debate, especially not in the 1870s. This period was marked on the French side by a widespread revenge spirit, the feeling of a national decline and a big appetite for new lands to settle in Algeria. In such an alignment of planets, the question of corruption could not be discussed, except to designate a collective and permanent responsibility on “rebel” families. The main issue for the colonial state was then how to appropriate as much indigenous land (and as

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soon) as possible, rather than whether it was legitimate or not to do it, whatever the method used. The indigenous inhabitants knew perfectly well they had to take this into account if they wanted to save a minimum of their assets. In their claims, formulated with the help and through the prism of public writers, they could at least turn the “corruption of blood” argument against the colonial rulers, even if they never used this learned expression. As their letters remained unanswered, they were forced to send new ones again and again; the outcome of their supplications might take time before being partially heard—if they did. Such an obstinacy could be explained as a matter of survival, and by the emotional attachment to lost heritage. However, one may add the awareness that it was driving a wedge in western legal and political culture, which was the only acceptable method after repression that was likely to provoke attention from the authorities one day. By its ramifications more than its resonance, the Bruat case intertwined both sides of the Mediterranean. This helps us to measure the impact on corruption practice and discourse generated by the 1871 indigenous revolt, the uncertainty of the regime change in France and Algeria, as well as the difficulty of the post-revolution agenda for attracting European migrants and capital within the colony, such as for separating private and public interests despite long-term state reforms. However, it also gives us a wider perspective bringing together different cultures that were themselves in transition; for instance, Adélaïde Bruat and Ahmed ben Ali ben Zoubir did not only represent antagonistic interests and unequal positions. Although they sent letters at the same time to the same senior officials regarding the same place, they belonged to completely different worlds which began to interpenetrate each other without ever giving the same meaning to the word “favour”, and even less to “corruption”. This makes it quite unrealistic, in our view, to formulate a common definition of what could be colonial corruption—the qualification being all at once too wide and too narrow as a spatial or temporal framework as well as too unilateral also to incorporate subaltern actors. All the same, it is a fact that common features emerge when we analyse corruption in colonial contexts: the great facilities available to illegal practices generally diverting indigenous economic resources; their marginal position paradoxically regarding those achieving similar objectives by legal tools; the

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close links and bridges between these two types of practices; a quasimonopoly of the anti-corruption discourse inside parts of the dominant power. Nevertheless, family resemblance is not enough when we approach corruption beyond Europe, or from one colony to another. As Ronald Kroeze, Pol Dalmau and Frédéric Monier emphasise in their introduction, the practice and discourse have to be understood “not as something fixed and universal, but as a phenomenon that is time and place dependent”. It also means that corruption could be a tool—and a very powerful one—more than a topic but with the help of which knowing in advance what it can finally reveal in different contexts is not being obvious.

Notes 1. Leslie C. Duly, British Land Policy at the Cape, 1795–1844: A Study of Administrative Procedures in the Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 1968); Edwin H. Gragert, Landownership Under Colonial Rule: Korea’s Japanese Experience, 1900–1935 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994); Jap de Moor and Dietmar Rothermund, eds., Our Laws, Their Lands: Land Laws and Land Use in Modern Colonial Societies (Münster: LIT Verlag, 1994); Virginia Martin, Law and Customs in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the Middle Horde and Russian Colonialism in the xixth Century (Richmond: Curzon, 2001); John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). 2. Marcel Trudel, Les débuts du régime seigneurial au Canada (Montreal: Fides, 1974); Gisela Von Wobeser, La formación de la hacienda en la época colonial. El uso del agua y la tierra (Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1983); Nicholas P. Canny, Making Ireland British 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); François Chevalier, La formation des grands domaines au Mexique. Terre et société, xvie , xviie , xviiie siècles (Paris: Karthala, 2006). 3. Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 87–109; Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 4. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 1996), 198. 5. Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence (France), département d’Alger (DA), 2 M/154/B.

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6. ANOM, Gouvernement général de l’Algérie (GGA), 1/419, Edmond Bruat personal file, employment record, no date [1877]. 7. ANOM, DA, 2 M/154/B, title deed of 14 January 1881; 1/419, governor general’s decree of 5 February 1881. 8. Centre de documentation historique sur l’Algérie (CDHA) in Aix-enProvence, Serna fonds, 16/ARC/11, investigation conducted between 28th of September and 27th of November 1934. 9. Weaver, Great Land Rush. 10. Didier Guignard, L’abus de pouvoir en Algérie coloniale (1880–1914). Visibilité et singularité (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2010). 11. Weaver, Great Land Rush, 46–130. 12. The republican opponent to the Second Empire, Jules Ferry, became famous in 1868 editing Les comptes fantastiques d’Haussman (Neuilly-surSeine: Guy Durier éditeur). This was a pamphlet condemning the financial management of Georges Haussman, Prefect of the Seine (1853–1870), who conducted transformational works in Paris. 13. Weaver, Great Land Rush, 178–215; Stéphane Caporal, “Gouverner par la faveur sous la monarchie française,” in La faveur et le droit, ed. Gilles J. Guglielmi (Paris: PUF, 2009), 95–123. 14. Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011). 15. One of the most influential representatives of this French complex, in the wake of the defeat against Prussia, was the liberal thinker Paul LeroyBeaulieu (1843–1916) who made international comparisons to incite the French government for more and better settlements overseas. See Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (Paris: Guillaumin, 1874). 16. Jean des Cars, “Les Historiens et la légende noire du Second Empire,” Paper presented at the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, Paris, 7 March 2005, https://www.canalacademie.com/ida148-Les-Historienset-la-legende-noire-du-Second-Empire.html. 17. Charles-Robert Ageron, Les Algériens musulmans et la France, 1871–1919 (Paris: Éditions Bouchène volume 1, 2005), 67–102; Alain Sainte-Marie, “Législation foncière et société rurale. L’application de la loi du 26 juillet 1873 dans les douars de l’Algérois,” Études rurales, no. 57 (1975): 61–87. 18. Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer, Le ‘royaume arabe’. La politique algérienne de Napoléon III, 1861–1870 (Alger: SNED, 1977), 583–611; Claude Lützelschwab, La Compagnie genevoise des colonies suisses de Sétif (1853– 1856): un cas de colonisation privée en Algérie (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2006). 19. François Caron, La France des patriotes de 1851 à 1918 (Paris: Fayard, 1985).

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20. Georges Benoît-Guyot, Bruat, amiral de France (Paris: André Bonne, 1960); Étienne Taillemite, Dictionnaire des marins français (Paris: Tallandier, 2002), 76. 21. Taillemite, Dictionnaire, 76–77. 22. Jacques Boulenger, Les Tuileries sous le Second Empire (Paris: CalmannLévy, 1932), 74–77. 23. ANOM, GGA, 1/419, letter of Governor General Mac-Mahon of January 1866 to “Miss Admiral Bruat, Governess of the Children of France”, letting her know that her recommendation for her nephew was wellreceived, and that he would take it into account. 24. Jean-Yves Mollier, Le scandale de Panama (Paris: Fayard, 1991), 250. 25. Henri de Peyerimhoff, La colonisation officielle de 1871 à 1895 (Tunis: Société anonyme de l’imprimerie rapide, 1928), 149. 26. Guignard, L’abus de pouvoir, 169–258. 27. Marcel Pinet, ed., Histoire de la fonction publique en France. Les xixe et xxe siècles (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie de France volume 3, 1993), 292– 305; Julie Bour and Koehler Volker, “Recommandations et clientélismes en miroir: la France de la iiie République et l’Allemagne de la république de Weimar,” in Patronage et corruption politiques dans l’Europe contemporaine. Les coulisses du politique à l’époque contemporaine, xixe -xxe siècles, eds. Frédéric Monier, Olivier Dard and Jens Ivo Engels (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014), 185–202. 28. Guignard, L’abus de pouvoir, 171–179. 29. Émile Larcher and Georges Rectenwald, Traité élémentaire de législation algérienne (Paris: Librairie Rousseau volume 3, 1923), 34–35, 37, 46. 30. Didier Guignard, “Des maîtres de parole en Algérie coloniale. Le récit d’une mise en scène,” Afrique et histoire 1, no. 3 (2005): 145. 31. ANOM, GGA, 1/419, employment record, no date [1877]. 32. ANOM, GGA, 1/419, assessment of 26 January 1864 from the Prefect of Algiers. 33. ANOM, GGA, 1/419, letter of 10 January 1866 from the Prefect of Algiers to the Sub-Prefect of Miliana. 34. ANOM, GGA, 1/419, assessments from the Prefect of Algiers of third semester 1872 and 18 January 1873. 35. ANOM, GGA, 1/419, assessment from the Sub-Prefect of Tizi Ouzou of 1 July 1977. 36. Guignard, L’abus de pouvoir, 207–221. 37. Guignard, L’abus de pouvoir, 44–59, 71–80. 38. Weaver, Great Land Rush, 264–308. 39. John Ruedy, Land Policy in Colonial Algeria: The Origins of the Rural Public Domain (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967). 40. Rey-Goldzeiguer, Le ‘royaume arabe’, 189–208; Didier Guignard, “L’indigénophilie dans l’esprit et dans la pratique: Ismaÿl Urbain et

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41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

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la réforme de 1863 en Algérie,” in Les saint-simoniens dans l’Algérie du xixe siècle. Le combat du Français musulman Ismaÿl Urbain, ed. Michel Levallois and Philippe Régnier (Paris: Riveneuve éditions, 2016), 245–273. Lützelschwab, Compagnie genevoise, 35–39. Guignard, “Des maîtres de parole,” 129–154. Ruedy, Land Policy, 37–66. Hildebert Isnard, La réorganisation de la propriété rurale dans la Mitidja (ordonnance royale du 21 juillet 1846 et commission des transactions et partages, 1851–1867). Ses conséquences sur la vie indigène (Alger: Imprimerie Joyeux, 1948); Miriam Hoexter, “Le contrat de quasialiénation des awq¯ af à Alger à la fin de la domination turque: étude de deux documents d’ anā ,” Bulletin of Oriental and African Studies 47, no. 2 (1984): 243–259; Didier Guignard, “Terre promise mais pas prise. Les déboires de la colonisation de Maraman en Algérie (1834–1854),” in Étudier en liberté les mondes méditerranéens. Mélanges offerts à Robert Ilbert, ed. Leyla Dakhli and Vincent Lemire (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2016), 413–424; Jacques Budin, “La ‘reconnaissance’ de la propriété rurale dans l’arrondissement de Bône (Annaba) en application des ordonnances des 1er octobre 1844 et 21 juillet 1846,” in Propriété et société en Algérie contemporaine. Quelles approches?, ed. Didier Guignard (Aix-en-Provence: IREMAM, 2017), 95–115, https://books.ope nedition.org/iremam/3673. ANOM, GGA, 3F/13, 3F/19, 3F/24, 3F/34, minutes of proceedings of the Government General Council deliberating on Antoine Bruat’s acquisitions, 7 November 1844, 30 July 1847, 5 November 1849 and 30 December 1854. ANOM, GGA, 3F/54, minutes of proceedings of the Government General Council, 18 December 1867. ANOM, GGA, 3F/54, minutes of proceedings of the Government General Council, 18 December 1867. ANOM, European civil status, Antoine Bruat’s death certificate of 2 February 1876. ANOM, GGA, 1/419, assessment from the Prefect of Algiers of third semester 1872. ANOM, DA, 4 M/126/B, letter of the Sub-Prefect of Tizi Ouzou to the Prefect of Algiers, 16 October 1876. ANOM, GGA, 1/419, assessment from the Sub-Prefect of Tizi Ouzou of 31 December 1876. Jean-François Renucci, Le délit d’initié (Paris: PUF, 1995). Hervé Rayner, Les scandales politiques. L’opération ‘Mains propres’ en Italie (Paris: Michel Houdiard éditeur, 2005). Guignard, L’abus de pouvoir, 325–398.

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55. Didier Guignard, “L’affaire Beni Urjin: un cas de résistance à la mainmise foncière en Algérie coloniale,” Insaniyat, no. 25–26 (2004): 101–122; Jennifer Sessions, “Débattre de la licitation comme stratégie d’acquisition des terres à la fin du xix e siècle,” in Propriété et société en Algérie contemporaine. Quelles approches?, ed. Didier Guignard (Aix-enProvence: IREMAM, 2017), 95–115, https://books.openedition.org/ire mam/3614. 56. ANOM, GGA, 8 M/12, governor general’s sequestration decree of 24 November 1871. 57. ANOM, DA, 2 M/157/b, governor general’s sequestration decree of 10 June 1874 and letter of the Prefect of Algiers to the governor general, 3 May 1876. 58. Max Stier, “Corruption of Blood and Equal Protection: Why the Sins of the Parents Should Not Matter,” Stanford Law Review 44, no. 3 (1992): 727–757; Jack Lynch, “A Patriot, a Traitor, and a Bill of Attainder,” Colonial Williamsburg: The Journal of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation 24, no. 1 (2002): 12–17; M. Fourie and Johannes Pienaar Gerrit, “Tracing the Roots of Forfeiture and the Loss of Property in English and American Law,” Fundamina 23, no. 1 (2017): 20–38. 59. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press volume 2, 1765–1769), 287–293. 60. Daniel H. Hamilton, The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 61. Richard Boast and Richard Hill, ed., Raupatu: The Confiscation of Maori Land (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2009); Anna Maria Monti, “La confiscation des biens dans les codes pénaux européens (xix e -xx e siècles),” in Le Code Pénal. Les métamorphoses d’un modèle, 1810–2010, ed. Chantal Aboucaya and Renée Martinage (Lille: Centre d’histoire judiciaire, 2012), 39–49. 62. ANOM, GGA, 8 M/55, report from the district chief of Tizi Ouzou, 17 April 1872. 63. Hervé Bleuchot, Droit musulman (Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires d’Aix-Marseille volume 2, 2000), 669–722; Adolphe Hanoteau and Aristide Letourneux, La Kabylie et les coutumes kabyles (Paris: Éditions Bouchène volume 2, 2003), 199–200. 64. Ageron, Algériens musulmans, 35. 65. ANOM, AD, 2 M/157/b, letter to the Prefect of Algiers, May 1875. 66. ANOM, AD, 2 M/157/b, letter to the governor general, 25 March 1882. 67. Alain Sainte-Marie, “Requiem pour 2 344 convoyeurs algériens morts ou disparus à Madagascar en 1895,” Cahiers de la Tunisie 36, no. 143–144 (1988): 43–76.

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68. ANOM, AD, 2 M/157/B, descriptive plan of the parcels given to Ahmed ben Zoubir’s children, January 1898. 69. ANOM, GGA, 8 M/16, letter from the collector of revenues for the public domain at Ménerville to his superior in Algiers, 9 September 1918. 70. Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, “L’économie morale de la corruption en Afrique,” Politique africaine, no. 63 (1996): 109.

References Ageron, Charles-Robert. Les Algériens musulmans et la France, 1871–1919. Paris: Éditions Bouchène, 2005 (2 volumes). Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 1996. Benoît-Guyot, Georges. Bruat, amiral de France. Paris: André Bonne, 1960. Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the laws of England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1765–1769 (4 volumes). Bleuchot, Hervé. Droit musulman. Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires d’AixMarseille, 2000 (2 volumes). Boast, Richard, and Richard Hill, ed. Raupatu: The Confiscation of Maori Land. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2009. Boulenger, Jacques. Les Tuileries sous le Second Empire. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1932. Bour, Julie, and Koehler Volker. “Recommandations et clientélismes en miroir: la France de la iiie République et l’Allemagne de la république de Weimar.” In Patronage et corruption politiques dans l’Europe contemporaine. Les coulisses du politique à l’époque contemporaine, xixe -xxe siècles, edited by Frédéric Monier, Olivier Dard and Jens Ivo Engels, 185–202. Paris: Armand Colin, 2014. Budin, Jacques. “La ‘reconnaissance’ de la propriété rurale dans l’arrondissement de Bône (Annaba) en application des ordonnances des 1er octobre 1844 et 21 juillet 1846.” In Propriété et société en Algérie contemporaine. Quelles approches?, edited by Didier Guignard, 95–115. Aix-en-Provence: IREMAM, 2017. Open Edition. https://books.openedition.org/iremam/3673. Canny, Nicholas P. Making Ireland British 1580–1650. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Caporal, Stéphane. “Gouverner par la faveur sous la monarchie française.” In La faveur et le droit, edited by Gilles J. Guglielmi, 95–123. Paris: PUF, 2009. Caron, François. La France des patriotes de 1851 à 1918. Paris: Fayard, 1985. Chevalier, François. La formation des grands domaines au Mexique. Terre et société, xvie , xviie , xviiie siècles. Paris: Karthala, 2006. De Moor, Jap, and Dietmar Rothermund, eds. Our Laws, Their Lands: Land Laws and Land Use in Modern Colonial Societies. Münster: LIT Verlag, 1994.

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De Peyerimhoff, Henri. La colonisation officielle de 1871 à 1895. Tunis: Société anonyme de l’imprimerie rapide, 1928. Des Cars, Jean. “Les Historiens et la légende noire du Second Empire.” Paper presented at the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, Paris, 7 March 2005. https://www.canalacademie.com/ida148-Les-Historiens-et-la-legendenoire-du-Second-Empire.html. Duly, Leslie C. 1968. British Land Policy at the Cape, 1795–1844: A Study of Administrative Procedures in the Empire. Durham: Duke University Press. Fourie, M., and Johannes Pienaar Gerrit. “Tracing the roots of forfeiture and the loss of property in English and American law.” Fundamina 23, no. 1 (2017): 20–38. Gragert, Edwin H. Landownership under Colonial Rule. Korea’s Japanese Experience, 1900–1935. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. Guignard, Didier. “L’affaire Beni Urjin: un cas de résistance à la mainmise foncière en Algérie coloniale.” Insaniyat, no. 25–26 (2004): 101–122. Guignard, Didier. “Des maîtres de parole en Algérie coloniale. Le récit d’une mise en scène.” Afrique et histoire 1, no. 3 (2005): 129–154. Guignard, Didier. L’abus de pouvoir en Algérie coloniale (1880–1914). Visibilité et singularité. Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2010. Guignard, Didier. “L’indigénophilie dans l’esprit et dans la pratique: Ismaÿl Urbain et la réforme de 1863 en Algérie.” In Les saint-simoniens dans l’Algérie du xixe siècle. Le combat du Français musulman Ismaÿl Urbain, edited by Michel Levallois and Philippe Régnier, 245–273. Paris: Riveneuve éditions, 2016. Guignard, Didier. “Terre promise mais pas prise. Les déboires de la colonisation de Maraman en Algérie (1834–1854).” In Étudier en liberté les mondes méditerranéens. Mélanges offerts à Robert Ilbert, edited by Leyla Dakhli and Vincent Lemire, 413–424. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2016. Hamilton, Daniel H. The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Hanoteau, Adolphe, and Aristide Letourneux. La Kabylie et les coutumes kabyles. Paris: Éditions Bouchène, 2003 (3 volumes). Hoexter, Miriam. “Le contrat de quasi-aliénation des awq¯ af à Alger à la fin de la domination turque: étude de deux documents d’ anā .” Bulletin of Oriental and African Studies 47, no. 2 (1984): 243–259. Isnard, Hildebert. La réorganisation de la propriété rurale dans la Mitidja (ordonnance royale du 21 juillet 1846 et commission des transactions et partages, 1851–1867). Ses conséquences sur la vie indigène. Alger: Imprimerie Joyeux, 1948. Larcher, Émile, and Georges Rectenwald. Traité élémentaire de législation algérienne. Paris: Librairie Rousseau, 1923 (3 volumes).

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Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul. De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes. Paris: Guillaumin, 1874. Lynch, Jack. “A Patriot, a Traitor, and a Bill of Attainder.” Colonial Williamsburg: The Journal of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation 24, no. 1 (2002): 12–17. Lützelschwab, Claude. La Compagnie genevoise des colonies suisses de Sétif (1853– 1856): un cas de colonisation privée en Algérie. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2006. Martin, Virginia. Law and Custom in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the Middle Horde and Russian Colonialism in the xixth Century. Richmond: Curzon, 2001. Mollier, Jean-Yves. Le scandale de Panama. Paris: Fayard, 1991. Monti, Anna Maria. “La confiscation des biens dans les codes pénaux européens (xix e -xx e siècles).” In Le Code Pénal. Les métamorphoses d’un modèle, 1810– 2010, edited by Chantal Aboucaya and Renée Martinage, 39–49. Lille: Centre d’histoire judiciaire, 2012. Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre. “L’économie morale de la corruption en Afrique.” Politique africaine, no. 63 (1996): 97–116. Pinet, Marcel, ed. Histoire de la fonction publique en France. Les xixe et xxe siècles. Paris: Nouvelle Librairie de France, 1993 (volume 3). Rayner, Hervé. Les scandales politiques. L’opération ‘Mains propres’ en Italie. Paris: Michel Houdiard éditeur, 2005. Renucci, Jean-François. Le délit d’initié. Paris: PUF, 1995. Rey-Goldzeiguer, Annie. Le ‘royaume arabe’. La politique algérienne de Napoléon III, 1861–1870. Alger: SNED, 1977. Ruedy, John. Land Policy in Colonial Algeria: The Origins of the Rural Public Domain. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967. Sainte-Marie, Alain. “Législation foncière et société rurale. L’application de la loi du 26 juillet 1873 dans les douars de l’Algérois.” Études rurales, no. 57 (1975): 61–87. Sainte-Marie, Alain. “Requiem pour 2 344 convoyeurs algériens morts ou disparus à Madagascar en 1895.” Cahiers de la Tunisie 36, no. 143–144 (1988): 43–76. Sessions, Jennifer. By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011. Sessions, Jennifer. “Débattre de la licitation comme stratégie d’acquisition des terres à la fin du xix e siècle.” In Propriété et société en Algérie contemporaine. Quelles approches?, edited by Didier Guignard, 95–115. Aix-en-Provence: IREMAM, 2017. Open Edition. https://books.openedition.org/iremam/ 3614. Stier, Max. “Corruption of Blood and Equal Protection: Why the Sins of the Parents Should Not Matter.” Stanford Law Review 44, no. 3 (1992): 727– 757.

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Stoler, Ann Laura. “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance.” Archival Science, no. 2 (2002): 87–109. Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Taillemite, Étienne. Dictionnaire des marins français. Paris: Tallandier, 2002. Trudel, Marcel. Les débuts du régime seigneurial au Canada. Montreal: Fides, 1974. Von Wobeser, Gisela. La formación de la hacienda en la época colonial. El uso del agua y la tierra. Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1983. Weaver, John C. The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.

CHAPTER 9

“There’s Nothing Like Having Good Influence in Madrid!”: Fraud and Immorality in Cuba, the “Pearl of the Antilles” Pol Dalmau

Introduction On the 1 January 1899, the Spanish flag was lowered for the last time in Cuba. What started as a separatist insurrection against colonial rule eventually derived into an international conflict when the United States joined the war in 1898. The direct consequence of this decision was the spread of hostilities to all of Spain’s colonial dominions, from the Caribbean (Cuba and Puerto Rico) to South-East Asia (the Philippines). 200,000 soldiers were sent to Cuba, and over 1,000 pesetas spent on the operation, yet neither were enough for Spain to win the war against the US troops and colonial rebels. A centuries-long tradition of Spanish colonial rule in the Caribbean and Asia thus reached an abrupt end. The “Disaster” of 1898, as the demise of empire became widely known in Spain, was a national trauma with deep repercussions over the

P. Dalmau (B) Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Kroeze et al. (eds.), Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era, Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9_9

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following decades. The outcome was a process of national introspection in which numerous voices elucidated the reasons for the country’s decline. All these projects, collectively referred as Regeneracionismo (“Regenerationism”), presented many differences but had one point in common: they all coincided in pointing to electoral fraud (or caciquismo as it was called in Spanish) as one of the main reasons for Spain’s end as a colonial power. Since 1874, the country was ruled by two monarchic parties: the Conservatives and the Liberals alternated in power by means of clientelist procedures. Crucial to this arrangement, in many ways similar to the cases of Portugal and Italy,1 was a wide network of supporters who rigged the local elections in exchange for private benefits. While the dominance of monarchic parties had long attracted criticism, the military defeat in 1898 intensified the feeling that “oligarchy and caciquismo” was a disease that had poisoned the national body—the demise of the empire being the latest and most traumatic evidence of this.2 Influenced by the claims of contemporaries, historians of modern Spain have devoted great attention to examining political clientelism.3 It has only been in the last decade that, influenced by research carried in France, Germany and the Netherlands,4 they have started moving beyond the study of clientelism. The outcome has been a new stream of research on corruption, sometimes posed from a wider European perspective, devoted to examining various themes such as the shady dealings between politicians and economic lobbies, the eruption of scandals, or the legal measures to curtail corruption—to mention but a few examples.5 While these new works have decisively contributed to renewing the field, to the point that some authors speak of a “new history of corruption”, there are two elements that still hamper the literature, mostly in Spain but in other countries as well. Firstly, the nation-state remains the predominant framework of reference. With few valuable exceptions, most scholarship remains oblivious to the calls made in the last 25 years to adopt relational approaches—transnational history in particular.6 The second limitation in the literature on corruption is that the majority of research questions are still posed from a European perspective. This should not necessarily be seen as a problem; in a period where national traditions still carry much weight, bringing scholars from different countries under a common research agenda is an important landmark. However, the moment we start examining corruption beyond Europe, we should wonder about the validity of our heuristic tools. Thus,

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we should assess the extent to which certain concepts, such as accountability, civil society or the public–private divide—that are so crucial to the (European) historian’s toolkit—are still valid heuristic methods to examine corruption in colonial settings.7 This caution regarding the trap of Eurocentrism is all the more important given the multiple normative codes and customs that existed in colonial societies, and which framed the relations between colonial authorities and indigenous populations. All the chapters in this volume tackle the same question in one way or another, based on the common emphasis to study corruption from a contextual approach. The different contributions show that the characteristics (and perceptions) of corruption—let’s say in British India or in French Algeria—were extremely diverse, as they obeyed the different local contexts and to each colony’s specificities. At the same time, however, most chapters in this book also reveal that the broader imperial context is crucial to understand the causal reasons behind corruption. Examining fraudulent practices in colonies in Asia, Africa, South America or the Caribbean therefore requires a multi-sided analysis, capable of combining the local perspective with the analysis of imperial dynamics, as well as the responses of indigenous actors, too. On some occasions, such as that of Dutch Indonesia at the turn of the nineteenth century, colonial corruption provided the background for deep imperial reforms, as Ronald Kroeze shows in his chapter. Scandals, however, are—by definition—exceptional cases, and that is precisely what makes them particularly interesting from a historical perspective.8 Nevertheless, more often corruption was tolerated, or not even perceived as such, given the blurred lines that existed between the different normative codes that characterised daily practices in colonial societies.9 Still, in certain situations corruption was manifest and widespread, and resulted from the economic exploitation that is concomitant to colonial rule. This could range from land alienation—as Didier Guignard examines for the case of French Algeria—to many other forms of economic measures (such as coerced labour or state monopolies) that were designed to benefit the metropole’s primary interests. In the case of British India, for instance, it has been estimated that the GDP between 1820 and 1870 did not rise at all, and only 0.5% until 1913, thus showing that imperial rule benefitted Britain first and foremost.10 Likewise, the Belgian Congo and the Dutch East Indies have been referred as being “among the most effectively exploited colonies of the modern era”.11 A wide range

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of colonial extraction practices were put in practice that directly benefitted the metropole’s economy: in the Netherlands, for instance, tropical commodities (sugar, tea and above all coffee) amounted to 52% of Dutch central state tax revenue, and directly contributed to the modernisation of the economy from the last third of the nineteenth century onwards.12 In some cases, economic drain was combined with persistent levels of corruption. This chapter seeks to examine such entwined phenomena through the case of one of the most prosperous colonies in the modern world: Cuba. In the nineteenth century, the island developed a highly prosperous slave plantation economy that was, nevertheless, seriously curtailed by rampant levels of corruption. While some of these fraudulent practices exploited Cuba’s deep integration into the global economy, the structural reasons behind the phenomenon were linked to the institutional framework of the Spanish empire. The following pages will make emphasis, therefore, on the imperial dimensions that corruption had, in line with the calls made by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler to treat colony and metropole under one single analytical framework.13 In this regard, it is surprising that none of the many Spanish intellectuals, who at the beginning of the twentieth century blamed electoral fraud for the loss of empire, actually made reference to corruption within the colonies. Joaquín Costa, for instance, who conducted a massive survey to explain the widespread presence of clientelism in Restoration Spain (1874–1923), limited his analysis to the metropole.14 Of course, the empire was lost and it did not make much sense to think about the colonies, as the main purpose was now to “regenerate” Spain. However, if concern was also identifying the reasons for national decline, and corruption stood at the centre of the debate, it is nevertheless surprising that neither Costa (nor any of the 171 people he interviewed) made reference to corruption in the Spanish empire.15 Such silence is particularly striking given the widespread character that corruption had in Cuba, as well as in the Philippines where Xavier Huetz de Lemps has extensively shown its systemic character.16 How can we explain, then, the contrast between the intellectual’s repeated denouncing of fraudulent practices in the metropole, and their silence about the same issue in the colonies? How similar was corruption in the Spanish empire, compared to the French, English or Dutch empires, also examined in this volume? Most importantly, what does corruption tell us about imperial trajectories?

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Diminished Empire and the Sugar Island The importance of mid-nineteenth-century Spain as a colonial power did not derive as much from the breath of its overseas possessions as from the wealth they produced. After losing most of its American territories in the 1820s, Spain was left with a small portion of its early modern empire that consisted of the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, the Philippines in South-East Asia and some footholds in Northern Africa. Contrary to what one may expect, however, contemporaries did not see mid-nineteenth-century Spain as a decaying imperial power.17 One reason for this was the changes occurring in the global economy at the time, changes which produced an economic booming in some of the remaining colonies. This was particularly so in the case of Cuba. Following the 1792 British invasion of the island, Spanish authorities introduced drastic reforms that included slow but continued liberalisation of the economy with the support of creole elites.18 These measures favoured the transformation of Cuba into a highly prosperous agro-export economy, based on intensive slave labour and the monoculture of sugar and tobacco. By the second third of the century, the island had become the world’s largest producer of sugar and also a modern and thriving society. Spain itself greatly benefitted from the prosperity of the “Pearl of the Antilles”, in the form of accumulated wealth that allowed industrialisation to take off on the Iberian Peninsula, and the foundations of a new liberal state to be laid. Moreover, regular massive transfers were sent to a metropole that was torn by the Carlist Wars, and even one million pesos were sent annually to Queen Regent María Cristina as personal allocation.19 Such constant draining of funds—typical of the economic exploitation system of imperial rule—only became sustainable due to the spectacular growth that the sugar island experienced at the time. Not in vain, scholars have referred to nineteenth-century Cuba as “probably the richest colony in the world, surpassing even the fabled Java of the Dutch”.20 Still, rampant levels of corruption jeopardised Cuba’s prosperity. This topic has received surprisingly little attention, as noted by Irene Montaud.21 The exception to this is the pioneering work of Alfonso W. Quiroz (1956–2013), a historian who devoted much attention to studying corruption in Peru, but who later drew his attention to Cuba. By means of an institutional perspective and a long-term analysis, Quiroz classified the evolution of corruption in the “sugar island” in four cycles.22

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The first corresponded to the first third of the nineteenth century, and was characterised by the misuse of royal funds by colonial bureaucrats and widespread contraband. The traffic in contraband affected goods that carried high tariffs, such as tobacco and cattle, but also the slave trade that Spain officially abolished (although it continued illegally) in 1820. The second period corresponds to the period from 1833 to 1868, when military authorities turned a blind eye to administrative abuses for the sake of maintaining the empire’s integrity, following the loss of the American territories, while the third period saw a peak in corruption as a result of the Ten Years’ War (1869–1878). The last cycle corresponded to the final years of colonial rule, when corruption persisted despite the introduction of legal measures, which were admittedly moderate.23 The observation of Quiroz that the Ten Years’ War (1869–1878) marked a peak in the levels of corruption can be tested, and explored in more detail, through the Cuban testimonies of the period. One of the most precious sources to do so is a book called El País del Chocolate (Chocolate Land), published in 1887 with the subtitle “La inmoralidad en Cuba” (Immorality in Cuba).24 The author, a journalist named Francisco Moreno, jumped onto the stage with the conviction that the island was subsumed in corruption, but public opinion lacked first-hand knowledge in order to curtail the problem.25 With this goal in mind, Moreno provided a detailed portrait of the innumerable occurrences of misconduct on the island. One example was the customs office (Aduana), where all kinds of tricks were used to divert taxes from the treasury, including manipulation of goods declarations by registering them under categories that carried less taxes, or simply hiding certain quantities from the official records. Bolder strategies consisted of ships circumnavigating the port of entry and unloading goods secretly, with the help of officers who kept the goods in their own homes. Irregularities in the customs office alone amounted to losses in state direct contributions of four million pesos a year, to the point that the customs office was regarded as the main black hole in the Spanish administration.26 Fraudulent practices, however, were extensive to many other areas, such as avoiding taxes on property transfers or misusing state property. In fact, and surprising as it may seem, there was no accurate inventory of state property in Cuba; the only attempt to take stock of it in 1881 ended after only six months.27 Such loose control on state assets made room for all sort of abuses: as the author deplored, “we continue to see how State assets are sacked, whether it is in the form

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of lands, the immense forests full of trees with precious wood or in the urban [state] properties where friends of officers now live (…)”.28 Moreover, institutional corruption was not limited to tax authorities, but was also present in other state bodies, such as “Gobernación” (in charge of infrastructures, hygiene, agriculture and trade). From the new works in the port to the cleaning contract or the supply to prisons, every sphere was an opportunity for illicit gain. According to Moreno, the only difference between the diverse state organs was the amount of “chocolate” they consumed, which depended on the attributions that bureaucrats oversaw and the possibilities that these offered for shady dealings. Hence, “in the branch of Gobernación, only the favored, the wise and the lackeys are the ones who drink chocolate; [whereas] in the branch of Treasury, to a greater or lesser extent, everyone, from the custodian of an archive to the department of ordinance and the directory of payments, drink chocolate”.29 The picture conveyed in works such as El país del chocolate, is one of a society deeply entrenched in corruption across all spheres of administration. Indeed, and according to the estimates of Quiroz, the loss of colonial revenues derived from bureaucratic corruption amounted to nothing less than 50% of the island’s annual budget between 1868 and 1878, and approximately 20% in the period 1880–1890.30 What were the reasons, we may then wonder, that explain such high levels of corruption?

Transatlantic Patronage Networks Contemporaries often coincided in singling out the Spanish colonial administration as the one to blame for the above described situation. The main problem had to do with the kind of people that became interested in working in the colonies. Hence, as one observer lamented: “every employer who moves to the Antilles does it for two reasons; namely: out of misery, because he cannot sustain his own family with his salary and secondly, because he has the ambition of building a fortune at any cost”.31 Indeed, becoming a public servant in the nineteenth-century Spanish empire was a risky adventure. To begin with, there was the long journey to the destination, which in the case of Cuba took several weeks, the cost of which employers had to assume themselves (the state only reimbursed the amount afterwards). Travel expenses included train and boat tickets, accommodation, as well as leaving a maintenance allowance for family members who remained in Spain. The majority of candidates,

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most of whom were of humble origins, could not afford all these expenses and were forced to request a loan, which carried high rates of interest at the time. As a result, by the time the employer took up his role, he had to devote a considerable part of his new salary to pay all of the incurred costs—with the added problem that salaries were rather modest and were often paid with a delay of two, three or even four months. Nonetheless, even after assuming all these expenses, colonial administrators could not expect a comfortable position. As Jean-Philippe Luis has explained, until the mid-nineteenth-century colonial officers were paid according to sliding remuneration linked to a percentage derived from taxes and fines. It was not until 1852 that the first attempts were made to unify the professional status of bureaucrats in the Peninsula and overseas, with limited success.32 Worst still, the same men could not rely on a long-term job. The reason for this is that the Spanish political system worked according to a spoils system, by which every change in government was followed by a change in the public administration. This is a reality that historians of modern Spain have studied in detail, and which had to do with the patron–client networks upon which the pre-eminence of monarchic parties (Liberal and Conservative) stood. Hence, it has been estimated that between 1,000 and 5,000 positions changed hands after each election in Spain in order to make room for the new government’s client base.33 Colonial officers were no exception to this client-led form of recruitment, and were also subject to the highly volatile character of the Spanish administration. Indeed, middle- and high-ranking officers were appointed in Madrid; only junior officers were selected in Cuba by heads of the local administration.34 Because of this pattern of recruitment, the most important jobs in the colonial administration—in the fields of justice, treasury or in the army—were often distributed, as it happened on the metropole, on the basis of patronage networks.35 Hence, the first step of candidates to the colonial administration often began with the search of a “local boss” in Spain who would endorse his application. This kind of personal endorsement marked the beginning of patron–client relationships, which can be defined as asymmetric, but mutually beneficial transactions between at least two actors holding different positions in society.36 On the one hand, there is a “patron” who provides privileged access to a “client” to certain public resources he controls. The nature of these public resources might be material

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(such as jobs or administrative concessions), but they might also encompass human resources (like protection). In return, the client provides his support (in the form of personal loyalty), reaffirming the patron’s pre-eminent position in society. For this reason, scholars have explained patron–client relationships as a mechanism for the distribution of public resources, as well as a practice that allowed for connecting the centre and the periphery. In the case of the colonies, however, the nature of this system clearly favoured Spanish “peninsulars” (that is, born in the metropole) to the detriment of Cubans, since they were placed in a more favourable position to join patronage networks. This was all the more the case given the highly centralist (and above all, militaristic) design that characterised the Spanish empire since its deep restructuring in the late eighteenth century.37 Unequal access to public administration, coupled with widespread corruption, contributed to creating a very negative image of colonial officers in Cuba. The literature of the period contains many examples of this. One of them is the book of Ramón Meza called Mi tío el empleado (My uncle the employee), published in 1887 and considered one the most important Cuban novels of the nineteenth century.38 The book focuses on the adventures of two humble Spaniards, named Manuel and Vicente Cuevas, who emigrated to Cuba in search of a better life. In a short period of time, both manage to climb the ladders of society and one of them even receives a nobiliary title, thanks to their corrupt actions. The story begins with the arrival of the two men in Havana, where they quickly get a job in the administration thanks to a letter of recommendation written by the Marquis of Casa-Vetusta, “Madrid’s wealthiest man”, in the words of the protagonist. The following chapters describe, in harsh terms, the mediocrity of the Spanish administration and the wide range of malpractices that pervaded it. Crucial to the success of the protagonists were the personal connections they possessed across the Atlantic. Hence, the protagonists made up all sorts of useless requests to the metropole (for instance they requested new chairs and a ladder for the office), as a pretext to inflate the budget. However, rather than being rejected, all of these requests were rapidly approved in Spain. The reason appears to be clear: the false accounting benefitted all of the members of the patronage network, both in the colony and in the metropole. The successful outcome led the main character to celebrate: “There’s nothing like having good influence in Madrid!” (¡No hay más que tener buenas influencias en Madrid!). Examples such as this reveal to what

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extent patronage networks were not limited to the Iberian Peninsula or to caciquismo, but possessed an Atlantic dimension that historians have barely examined to date.39

Corruption as a Weapon Against Colonial Rule As may be imagined, novels such as Mi tío el empleado were not written to simply entertain readers, but contained a certain political agenda. Hence, the novel puts in contrast the thirst for the wealth of peninsulars with the case of Cubans, who are mostly absent in the novel because they cannot enter the colonial administration. Cubans are thus presented as foreigners in their own land. Another example is a character called Don Benigno—an honest and hard-working employee who is laid off in order to make room for the two newly arrived Spaniards, who do not know the job and can barely write a letter, but who nevertheless come with letters of recommendation from Madrid. Later on, in different chapters, Don Benigno appears again, but this time as a poor beggar who lives on the street. The underlying argument is that only the corrupt ones are the ones who thrive under Spanish rule. A third example of the bad image of colonial officers in the literature is the very title of Francisco Moreno’s work (quoted above): the “chocolateros ” was the nickname referring to the avid peninsulars who went to Cuba with the sole interest of enriching themselves by any means, with the hope of returning to Spain as nouveaux riches. From the broader perspective of corruption, what makes the case of the testimonies mentioned interesting is that they reveal that corruption became a powerful argument in the repertoire of Cuban separatists. In these novels, the wealth of the island is repeatedly contrasted with the inefficiency of colonial officers, thus highlighting two main ideas. First, Spaniards were not really interested in the well-being of Cubans or in the prosperity of the island, but only saw their stay in the colony as an opportunity for economic improvement. The second and most important argument, is that an independent Cuba would get rid of the systemic corruption that went hand-in-hand with the colonial yoke, thus allowing the birth of a new and more prosperous society. How and why this new society was to be achieved, in more specific terms, does not appear in the accounts mentioned above, for their mission was to use corruption as a rhetorical weapon to undermine Spanish legitimacy and endorse independence. In fact, there is evidence that one of the most popular leaders of

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Cuban independence (José Martí) saw in Mi tío el empleado a valuable piece to denounce the colonial yoke.40

Perceptions of Colonial Corruption in the Metropole To what extent was colonial corruption in Cuba known about in Spain? Was this a reality confined to the island, or perhaps a reality kept in secret by the leading politicians? There is ample evidence suggesting that public opinion in Spain became aware of the state of affairs in the Caribbean, albeit in a piecemeal and intermittent manner. Some newspapers, such as Barcelona’s progressive La Campana de Gràcia, repeatedly presented corruption as one of the biggest threats to Spain’s most cherished possession. Pictures often portrayed Cuba as a young African woman, for example in Picture 9.1, where a black female struggles not to drown in the sea, while assaulted by several sea monsters bearing the names of “bad government”, “administrative immorality” and “abuses”. Overhead, an eagle hovers representing US President William McKinley, threatening to take advantage of the situation and grab the woman with his claws. The footnote in the picture reveals the newspaper’s message to the public: “‘An eagle looms over a drowning Cuba. Spaniards, be aware’. (Havana will be lost!)”.41 This picture conveys a series of arguments, also present in Picture 9.2,42 which sought to denounce the state of affairs: Cuba is falling apart, due to Spanish economic exploitation and widespread fraud, while the US lurks in search of a chance to pounce. These examples reveal that already by the 1880s, long before the Spanish-American War (1898), fraud and immorality were already seen in Spain as posing a direct threat to the empire’s survival. Alongside the warnings made in the press, colonial scandals further contributed to disclosing colonial corruption in the metropole. An example of this is a scandal that crossed the Atlantic in 1887, and which attracted considerable attention in both Cuba and Spain. Its origins lay in the agency of Carlos Cuervo Arango, a man who served as “Subintendente de Hacienda” (Treasury) in the province of Santiago de Cuba. Contrary to what had been the case for his predecessors, Cuervo took ample measures to curtail corruption in the customs office (Aduana), an attitude that turned him into a respected and widely popular figure on the island. Eventually, Cuervo became aware of a forthcoming plot related to customs fraud and smuggling in his dominion, for which he informed

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Picture 9.1 “La situació de Cuba,” La Campana de Gràcia, March 14, 1891, 4. In the footnote: “Sobre Cuba que naufraga un aligot s’hi cerneix… Espanyols, visquém alerta: «La Habana se va a perder!»” (“An eagle looms over a drowning Cuba. Spaniards, be aware: «Havana will be lost!»”)

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Picture 9.2 “Situació de Cuba,” La Campana de Gràcia, April 20, 1884, 4. In the footnote: “Brotan por todas partes gérmenes de prosperidad” (“The seeds of prosperity spring everywhere”)

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his immediate superior. However, instead of prosecuting the smugglers, the intendant charged Cuervo with contempt for authority (desacato a la autoridad) and later on dismissed him from duty. It was at this point that some citizens of Havana, outraged by the treatment of Cuervo, decided to raise a public subscription to enable him to travel to Spain so he could inform the Minister of Ultramar and the Prime Minister about the state of affairs in Cuba.43 Nonetheless, all of these efforts were in vain, since despite repeated attempts no politician received him. In response, Cuervo wrote two large memorandums: one addressed to the “Minister of Ultramar” (the minister in charge of the colonies), and the other to the Spanish Parliament, where he denounced the unfair treatment he had received.44 The question at stake was not just his career as a public servant, but rather epitomised a problem affecting the Spanish colonial administration. For this reason, Cuervo defied the government in public: if they were to amend his dismissal, it would prove that the metropole supported those honest officers who stood out against corruption. Otherwise, were things to remain untouched, it would be irrefutable proof that the political class had no interest in changing things, thus providing motives for the enemies of Spain’s presence on the island. According to Cuervo, these were the terms in which public opinion in Cuba understood his case.45 Newspapers in Spain, however, paid scant attention to this public denouncement; although copies were distributed among the press, the call appears to have had a modest impact.46 The response came largely from progressive and Republican newspapers, such as El Globo, El Porvenir or El Progreso (to mention a few). The majority of these headlines appeared to be more or less familiar with Cuba’s state of affairs, but at the same time showed their surprise and consternation at the scale of corruption that the memorandums described.47 Most showed unmasked sympathy towards Cuervo’s quest and presented his case as comparable to the fight of David versus Goliath—the quest of a humble public servant who defied a much stronger enemy; i.e. the corrupt monarchic parties.48 Moreover, some newspapers considered that corruption was undermining Spain’s “civilising mission” in the Antilles. This was the opinion, for instance, of La República, who considered that monarchic parties were ignoring the “(…) humanitarian and highly civilising concept that colonialism has in our times (…). The metropole has the unavoidable obligation to introduce the rule of law to the colonized countries; not the barbarian right to exploit and degrade them”.49 Opinions such

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as this demonstrate that corruption in the colony was often perceived, even among the most progressive (and Republican) circles, as a problem of imperial governance, rather than as a problem affecting Cuban society. Nonetheless, the David versus Goliath metaphor revealed the scepticism of journalists about the results of Cuervo’s plea. While presented in positive terms, newspapers considered that this should be the first step of a broader movement, aimed at amending a problem that was regarded as posing a direct threat to the empire’s survival, at least among the newspapers in the opposition.50 However, these calls appear to be rather rhetorical; a clear feeling of scepticism permeates most of the articles. This should not come as a surprise, given the wide impunity that monarchic parties enjoyed at the time,51 and the wars that Spain had already fought (first in 1868–1878, and then again in 1879–1880) to hold on to its most precious colony.

Conclusions This chapter has raised attention to the absence of corruption in the colonies in the work of historians. The widespread tendency to use local and regional frames of analysis or, at best, national ones, has blinded scholars to the existence of corruption in the (Spanish) empire, even if we can count on some valuable exceptions.52 This trait, however, is not exclusive to the Spanish historiography and can be extended to other European countries, where corruption is still largely studied from a nation-centred perspective. Relational approaches, therefore, still have a long way to go in the field of corruption studies. Imperial history is but one of the different “connected approaches” that allows breaking the methodological nationalism that still pervades the literature. Nevertheless, next to the methods of historians, we should also wonder about the silence that corruption in the colonies had in the work of contemporaries. In comparison to the case of the British, French and Dutch empires, it is surprising that the thousands of pages that intellectuals devoted to examine caciquismo in Spain did not mention the existence of widespread corruption in Cuba and the Philippines—all the more given its widespread character. One possible explanation for this, as this chapter has argued, is that Spain’s political system relied upon a patron–client system, and therefore attracted the bulk of criticism. Despite Cuba being Spain’s jewel in the crown, and in fact was regarded as part of the Spanish nation (the so-called provincias de Ultramar, or “overseas

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provinces”), the problem of corruption was perceived as a gangrene that originated in the head of the body. Its effects were felt in all of the corners of the empire, but it was at the core where the disease had to be rooted out. Corruption in Cuba was, therefore, primarily understood in terms of (bad) imperial governance. These observations lead us to a second, related question: to what extent did imperial authorities really seek to curtail corruption? One of the dangers in addressing this question is to consider that widespread corruption had to do with the “backwardness” of the Spanish empire. This interpretation risks approaching history through the lens of ideal models, where the failure in curtailing corruption is understood as a sign of “failure” in historical development. This caution is especially pertinent for the case of the Spanish empire, which is often presented—similarly to the Ottoman and Portuguese empires—as a protracted but inexorable story of “decline”.53 These narratives often draw on negative images and “black legends”, created in the context of inter-imperial competition in the early modern era, which had a long-lasting legacy.54 In fact, the other chapters in this book show, precisely, that corruption was a problem common to all European empires. Whether in Asia, Africa, South America or the Caribbean, corruption became a problem affecting colonial governance. Therefore, rather than seeing corruption as being exclusive to one single empire or colony, it seems more productive to examine it from a global comparative perspective. Examined in this light, it appears clear that—all precautions aside— corruption was not equal everywhere. The British, French and Dutch empires faced several cases of embezzlement, misappropriation and fraud, but these manifested more occasionally and (sometimes) resulted in deep, administrative reforms. This does not mean that corruption in these empires disappeared, but rather that the levels of accountability—often resulting from intra-party competition in the metropole—appear to be higher.55 The case of Cuba and the Philippines show, in contrast, that corruption in the Spanish empire had a more systemic character. The intensity and features of corruption changed across time and space, as Cuba and the Philippines were very different colonies in many respects. All the same, in both colonies corruption presented a structural, longterm pattern.56 It is at this point where the attention to local specificities needs to be combined with the broader imperial framework. The characteristics of the Spanish colonial administration seem to be a key-explaining factor. Since the late eighteenth century, the empire was

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re-modelled in a militarist and executive orientation, where all considerations were sacrificed for the ultimate aim of saving the remaining colonies from foreign aggression and separatist attempts. As part of this new imperial policy, special attention was made to ensure that in the colonial administration the number of Spanish peninsulars always remained higher than that of Spanish creoles. This does not mean that the ranks were completely closed to local elites, as room was left for them to take part in the colonial system, but the high-ranking positions were always reserved for the peninsulares. Moreover, in Madrid (where these positions were appointed), the two monarchic parties operated according to a spoils system, where each change of government was followed by the redistribution of civil positions—the colonial administration included. Therefore, political clientelism in Spain, and administrative corruption in Cuba, were different phenomenon that obeyed local logics, but were tightly interconnected. These considerations lead to a final conclusion: if Spanish authorities (and intellectuals) did not fight colonial corruption with more impetus, it is because this would contribute to undermining the empire’s foundations. As this chapter has shown, one of the most important leaders of Cuban independence (José Martí) saw the novel Mi tío el empleado as a valuable weapon against colonial rule. Moreover, the impact of such novels was not limited to Cuba, but was also echoed in the Philippines. This was the case of the Filipino leader José Rizal (1861–1896), who was familiar with the aforementioned Cuban novel, and who himself wrote two novels (Noli Me Tángere and El Filibusterismo) where he criticised the abuse and corruption of the colonial government and the Catholic Church.57 Spanish authorities banned these books for considering them subversive; in fact, Rizal was later arrested and executed for “inciting rebellion” based largely on his writings. All this shows to what extend corruption featured prominently in the writings of colonial nationalist leaders, and that anti-Spanish novels circulated between the Caribbean, South-East Asia and beyond.58 The concern not to give further munitions to anti-colonial activists might explain, therefore, why certain colonial scandals, such as the one examined in this chapter, received little attention back in the metropole. The care not to fuel anti-Spanish sentiments increased by the fact that the large majority of colonial officers that benefitted from fraudulent practices came from the metropole. If, in nineteenth-century Cuba, there was nothing as valuable as “having good influence in Madrid”, the

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few attempts that were made to curtail corruption in the colonies were designed, paradoxically, by the very same monarchic politicians that were part of the patronage networks. Examples of these are Víctor Balaguer (for the case of Cuba) and Segismundo Moret (for that of the Philippines), both examined elsewhere in this volume.59 These two politicians sponsored ambitious anti-corruption plans, but both found insurmountable resistance from the very patronage networks to which they belonged. The Spanish case thus seems to differ from that of the Netherlands and Britain, in that parties in the opposition forced sweeping investigations— as shown in the Billiton case or the numerous scandals related to the British East India Company.60 Moreover, in these two countries, institutions were created to educate and monitor the activity of colonial officers. Examples of this are the Indian Civil Service or the Dutch colonial service, the latter of which was created precisely in response to the Max Havelaar scandal.61 Contrastingly, no institution of that kind existed in the Spanish empire during the nineteenth century, and the two monarchic parties stood for a bipartisan system that benefitted both of them, as well as their patronage networks that spanned both sides of the Atlantic. All of this does not only cast doubt on the scope and real expectations behind anti-corruption measures in the Spanish empire, but also points at the future scenarios that metropolitan elites might have wanted to avoid. In a place like Cuba, where the colonial dominion had been challenged on so many occasions, and where so many bloody wars had been fought to quell demands for independence, taking measures against corrupt officers ran the risk of throwing the backbone of the empire into question. Seen in this light, corruption might have been a minor cost to be paid—and also, to benefit from—in order to preserve Spain’s last colonial possessions. Time, however, would prove all these attempts to be utterly futile.

Notes 1. These clientelistic procedures were: “rotativismo” in Portugal (since 1878); “trasformismo” in Italy (1876); and “sistema del turno” in Spain (1885). For a comparative approach of these three countries, see: Silvana Casmirri and Manuel Suárez Cortina, eds., La Europa del sur en la época liberal: España, Italia y Portugal. Una perspectiva comparada (SantanderCassino: Universidad de Cantabria-Università di Cassino, 1998); Pedro

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

“THERE’S NOTHING LIKE HAVING GOOD INFLUENCE IN MADRID!” …

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Tavares and Javier Moreno Luzón, eds., De las urnas al hemiciclo. Elecciones y parlamentarismo en la Península Ibérica (1875–1926) (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2015). Joaquín Costa, Oligarquía y caciquismo como la forma actual de gobierno en España: urgencia y modo de cambiarla (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1998). For a state of the art, see: Javier Moreno Luzón, “Political Clientelism, Elites and Caciquismo in Restoration Spain,” European History Quarterly 37, no. 3 (July 2007). Jens Ivo Engels, “Die Geschichte der Korruption. Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis ins 20. Jahrhundert,” in La politique vue d’en bas: pratiques privées, débats publics dans l’Europe contemporaine (XIXe–XXe siècles), eds. Jens Ivo Engels, Frédéric Monier and Natalie Petiteau (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011); Ronald Kroeze, André Vitória and Guy Geltner, eds., Anticorruption in History. From Antiquity to the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Bösch, Frank, “Politics with Scandals. Germany and Britain in Transnational perspective (1880–1914),” Historia y Política 39 (2018). Borja de Riquer, Joan Lluís Pérez Francesc, Gemma Rubí, Lluís Ferran Toledano and Oriol Luján, eds., La corrupción política en la España contemporánea. Un enfoque interdisciplinar (Barcelona: Marcial Pons, 2018); Pol Dalmau and Isabel Burdiel, eds., “La imagen pública del poder. Escándalos y causas célebres en Europa (siglos XIX–XX),” Historia y Política 39 (2018) (special theme). For an overview of these calls see: Kiran Klaus Patel, “An Emperor Without Clothes? The Debate About Transnational History Twenty-Five Years On,” Histoire@Politique nº 26 (mai–août 2015). Take, for instance, one of the most extended definitions of corruption, coined by Michael Johnston: “the abuse, according to the legal or social standards constituting a society’s system of public order, of a public role or resource for private benefit”, Michael Johnston, “The Search for Definitions: The Vitality of Politics and the Issue of Corruption,” International Social Science Journal 48, no. 3 (1996): 321–335. On the epistemological use of scandals, see: Jens Ivo Engels, Frédéric Monier and Natalie Petiteau, eds., La politique vue d’en bas. Pratiques privées et débats publics 19e–20e siècles (Paris: A. Colin, 2011); Dalmau and Burdiel, “La imagen pública del poder.” See, for instance, the chapter by Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla elsewhere in this volume. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History. Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 311.

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11. Ewout Frankema and Frans Buelens, Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development. The Belgian Congo and the Netherlands Indies Compared (London: Routledge, 2013), 3–4. 12. Ibid., 4. 13. Frederick Cooper and Anne L. Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Culture in a Bourgeois World, eds. F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56. Similar calls have been made for the specific case of Spain regarding “bringing the empire back in”. See: Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006). 14. The list of people he interviewed can be found in: J. Costa, Oligarquía y caciquismo, 53–59. 15. Ibid. 16. See Xavier Huetz de Lemps’ chapter in this volume, as well as his landmark book L’archipel des épices. La corruption de l’administration espagnole aux Philippinnes (fin XVIIIe–fin XIXe siècle) (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2006). 17. Josep Maria Delgado Ribas, “Eclispe and Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1650–1898,” in Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Decline, America’s Decline, eds. Alfred McCoy, Josep M. Fradera and Stephen Jacobson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). 18. Elena A. Schneider, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Williamsburg and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Josep M. Fradera, Colonias para después de un imperio (Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2005). 19. On the crucial role that the empire played in financing Spain’s battered state coffers, see: William G. Clarence-Smith, “The Economic Dynamics of Spanish Colonialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Itinerario 15, no. 1 (1991). The references to the Carlist War and the Queen Regent, in ibid., 74 and Alfonso W. Quiroz, “Implicit Costs of Empire: Bureaucratic Corruption in Nineteenth-Century Cuba,” Journal of Latin American Studies 35 (2003): 485. 20. Smith, “The Economic Dynamics,” 72. 21. Inés Roldán de Montaud, “El final de la presencia española en Cuba: últimas aportaciones historiográficas,” Ayer 55 (1994): 268, n. 8. 22. Quiroz, “Implicit Costs of Empire.” 23. On the measures to curtail corruption, see Gemma Rubí’s chapter in this volume. 24. Francisco Moreno, El país del chocolate (la inmoralidad en Cuba) (Madrid: Imprenta de F. García Herrero, 1887). Although there is

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25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

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little biographical information on Moreno, his denouncing of administrative abuse seems to be part of the political struggle between Captain General Miguel Tacón (1834–1868) and the General Intendant Conde de Villanueva (1780–1852). Later on, Moreno would publicly retract his slander against Villanueva. See: Francisco Moreno, El país del chocolate. Historia de una retractación (Madrid: Establecimiento Tipográfico Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1888). Ibid., 7. Ibid., 30. “Alto, sí, muy alto, podemos afirmar, sin temor de que se nos desmienta, que en el Ministerio de Ultramar, ni en la Intendencia, ni en la Intervención del Estado en Cuba, radican antecedentes ni documentos que acrediten de una manera innegable y clara, los bienes que el Estado posee en aquella Antilla”. Ibid., 54. Ibid. Ibid., 69. Original version in Spanish: “en el ramo de Gobernación solo toman chocolate los preferidos, los sabios y los favoritos de los jefes, en el de Hacienda, en mayor ó menor escala, todos lo toman, desde el encargado de la custodia de un archivo (…) hasta el negociado de ordenación y señalamiento de pago”. Quiroz, “Implicit Costs,” 510. Moreno, El país del chocolate (la inmoralidad en Cuba), 68. Jean-Philippe Luis, “Les employés: une horde prédatrice?” in L’état dans ses colonies. Les administrateurs de l’empire espagnol au XIX siècle), ed. Jean-Philippe Luis (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2015), 228 and 230. See also: Javier Alvarado Planas, ed., La Administración de Cuba en los siglos XVIII y XIX (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2017). Georgina Blakeley, “Clientelism in the Building of State and Civil Society in Spain” in Clientelism, Interests, and Democratic Representation: The European Experience in Historical and Comparative Perspective, ed. Simona Piattoni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 83; Antonio Albuera Guirnaldos, “El cesante: analisis de un «tipo» social del siglo XIX,” Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 12 (1990): 45–66. Luis, “Les employés,” 18. An illustrative example is the case of magistrates, studied in detail in: Jean-Philippe Luis, “Les magistrats d’outre-mer (1820–1898),” in L’état dans ses colonies. Les administrateurs de l’empire espagnol au XIX siècle, ed. Jean-Philippe Luis (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2015), 189–210. My own definition, based on the following literature: Luis Roniger, “Patron-Client Relationships, Anthropology Of,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, eds. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (Oxford and New York: Elsevier, 2001), 1118–1120;

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37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

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Jean François Médard, “Le rapport de clientèle du phénomène sociale à l’analyse politique,” Revue Française de Science Politique 26 (1976): 103–131; S. N. Eisenstadt and Luis Roniger, “Patron-Client Relations as a Model of Structuring Social Exchange,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, no. 1 (January 1980): 49–51. Fradera, Colonias. Ramón Meza, Mi tío el empleado (Madrid: Verbum, 2014; 1st ed. 1887). The situation is completely different for the case of the early-modern period, where there is a rich body of literature on the topic. See Yun’s chapter in this volume, as well as Francisco Andújar Castillo and Pilar Ponce Leiva, eds., Mérito, venalidad y corrupción en España y América. Siglos XVII y XVIII (Valencia: Albatros, 2016); Christoph Rosenmüller, ed., Corruption in the Iberian Empires. Greed, Custom and Colonial Networks (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017); Alexandre Coello de la Rosa, Claudia Contente, Martín Rodrigo Alharilla, eds., La justicia robada. Corrupción, codicia y bien público en el mundo hispánico (siglos XVII –XX) (Barcelona: Icaria, 2018). An interesting biographical case for the modern period, in: Inés Roldán de Montaud, “La carrera de un alto funcionario moderado en Cuba: Vicente Vázquez Queipo (1804–1893),” in L’état dans ses colonies. Les administrateurs de l’empire espagnol au XIX siècle, ed. Jean-Philippe Luis (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2015). José Martí, “Mi tío el empleado. Novela de Ramón Meza,” annex to R. Meza, Mi tío el empleado, 279–284. “La situació de Cuba,” La Campana de Gràcia, March 14, 1891, 4. In the footnote: “Sobre Cuba que naufraga un aligot s’hi cerneix…Espanyols, visquém alerta: «La Habana se va a perder!»”. “Situació de Cuba,” La Campana de Gràcia, April 20, 1884, 4. In the footnote: “Brotan por todas partes gérmenes de prosperidad” (in English: “The seeds of prosperity spring everywhere”). Exposición que a las Cortes del Reino dirige el ex Subintendente de Hacienda de la provincia de Santiago D. Cárlos Cuervo de Arango… (Madrid: Imp. de la viuda é hija de Fuentenebro, 1885); Exposición que al Excmo. Sr. Ministro de Ultramar dirige el ex subintendente de Hacienda Carlos Cuervo Arango con motivo de la causa criminal que, a pretexto de desacato, se le ha seguido… (Madrid: Imp. de la viuda é hija de Fuentenebro, 1884). Ibid. “Pero con la propia lealtad [Mr. Cuervo] ha de manifestar que se ha formado en la Isla de Cuba la opinión, y es dominante en el país, de que la vuelta del empleado novador á su destino ó á otro análogo significa el restablecimiento del sistema que fracasó en él, y esta vuelta desmentiría la

9

46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

54.

55.

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preocupación contraria en que se apoyan en mal hora los enemigos de la dominación española en aquellas provincias.” Ibid., 9. All of the articles that appeared in the Madrid press were compiled in a single publication. See: Opinión que la prensa madrileña ha emitido espontáneamente con presencia de las dos exposiciones que Cuervo Arango ha dirigido al Sr. Ministro de Ultarmar y á las Cortes del Reino (Madrid: Imp. de la Viuda é hija de Fuenenebro, 1885). Newspapers that do not appear in this publication have also been consulted. “Lo sucedido con el Sr. Cuervo Arango es una demostración aterradora del estado de corrupción que alcanza la administración de nuestros Gobiernos doctrinarios en Cuba.” La República, 11/07/1885 (p. 16). According to a testimony: “A Cuervo Arango sólo le dejan de querer, los que han robado ó dejado robar, los que roban ó dejan robar; los que piensan robar ó dejar robar.” Opinión que la prensa española, p. 19. “La Administración española en Cuba,” La República, 8/7/1885, 1. As El Globo deplored: “Apena, verdaderamente, el ánimo de todo español amante de su patria observar en obras, como la que criticamos, cuán hondas raíces tiene la inmoralidad en nuestra administración pública, y cuán difíciles de arrancar son éstas, por grandes y vigorosas que sean los esfuerzos. Y cada cual se pregunta, entristecido, si para un mal tan antiguo y tan extenso no habrá remedio, y tendremos que ver, sumidos en la importencia, cómo se forma, se aproxima y estalla al fin la catástrofe.” “La Administración pública en Cuba,” El Globo, 02/07/1885, 1. A similar standpoint was offered in: La Campana de Gràcia, “Situació de Cuba,” 4 and “La situació,” 4. Although the denouncing of clientelism had been a constant feature of Restoration Spain, little changed until the colonial “Disaster” of 1898. For an in-depth analysis of these questions, see: Pol Dalmau, “Fighting Against Corruption. Newspapers and Public Morality in Modern Spain,” in Scandales et corruption politique à l’époque contemporaine (XIXe–XXe siècles), eds. Frédéric Monier and Jens Ivo Engels (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014), 31–50. Especially the aforementioned studies of Quiroz for Cuba and of Huetz de Lemps for the Philippines. On the narrative of imperial decline, see: John H. Elliott, “The Decline of Spain,” Past and Present 20, no. 1 (November 1961); Bartolomé YunCasalilla, Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe, 1415– 1668 (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). For the early-modern period, see Yun’s chapter in this volume. For the lasting legacy, see Richard Kagan, “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain,” American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (1996). As can be seen in Chapters 2, 3, 5 and 6 in this book.

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56. In some cases, such as what Huetz de Lemps shows for the case of the Philippines, corruption remained a persistent problem even after the end of Spanish colonial rule. See Huetz de Lemps’ chapter in this volume. 57. Benedict Anderson, Under Three flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination (New York: Verso, 2005). 58. Ibid. 59. See the chapters of Gemma Rubí and Xavier Huetz de Lemps, respectively. 60. For the case of Dutch Indonesia, see the chapter of Ronald Kroeze. For that of British India, see the ones of Anubha Anushree, Mark Knights and Tanja Bührer. 61. In fact, the case of the British and Dutch empires would inspire the program of reforms of Segismundo Moret. See Huetz de Lemps’ chapter in this volume. On the Max Havelaar scandal, see the chapter by Ronald Kroeze.

References Albuera Guirnaldos, Antonio. “El cesante: analisis de un «tipo» social del siglo XIX.” Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 12 (1990): 45–66. Alvarado Planas, Javier, ed. La Administración de Cuba en los siglos XVIII y XIX . Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2017. Anderson, Benedict. Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination. New York: Verso, 2005. Andújar Castillo, Francisco and Pilar Ponce Leiva, eds. Mérito, venalidad y corrupción en España y América. Siglos XVII y XVIII . Valencia: Albatros, 2016. Blakeley, Georgina. “Clientelism in the Building of State and Civil Society in Spain.” In Clientelism, Interests, and Democratic Representation: The European Experience in Historical and Comparative Perspective, edited by Simona piattoni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Bösch, Frank. “Politics with Scandals. Germany and Britain in Transnational Perspective (1880–1914).” Historia y Política 39 (2018): 53–77. Burbank, Jane and Frederick Cooper. Empires in World History. Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Casmirri, Silvana and Manuel Suárez Cortina, eds. La Europa del sur en la época liberal: España, Italia y Portugal. Una perspectiva comparada. Santander-Cassino: Universidad de Cantabria-Università di Cassino, 1998. Coello de la Rosa, Alexandre and Martín Rodrigo Alharilla, eds. La justicia robada. Corrupción, codicia y bien público en el mundo hispánico (siglos XVII–XX). Barcelona: Icaria, 2018. Costa, Joaquín. Oligarquía y caciquismo como la forma actual de gobierno en España: urgencia y modo de cambiarla. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1998.

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Dalmau, Pol. “Fighting Against Corruption. Newspapers and Public Morality in Modern Spain.” In Scandales et corruption politique à l’époque contemporaine (XIXe–XXe siècles), edited by Frédéric Monier and Jens Ivo Engels, 31–50. Paris: Armand Colin, 2014. Dalmau, Pol and Isabel Burdiel, eds. “La imagen pública del poder. Escándalos y causas célebres en Europa (siglos XIX–XX).” Historia y Política 39 (2018) (special theme). Delgado Ribas, Josep Maria. “Eclispe and Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1650–1898.” In Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Decline, America’s Decline, edited by Alfred McCoy, Josep M. Fradera and Stephen Jacobson, 43–54. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. de Riquer, Borja, Joan Lluís Pérez Francesc, Gemma Rubí, Lluís Ferran Toledano and Oriol Luján, eds. La corrupción política en la España contemporánea. Un enfoque interdisciplinar. Barcelona: Marcial Pons, 2018. Elliott, John H. “The Decline of Spain.” Past and Present 20, no. 1 (November 1961): 52–75. Eisenstadt, S. N. and Luis Roniger. “Patron-Client Relations as a Model of Structuring Social Exchange.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, no. 1 (January 1980): 42–77. Engels, Jens Ivo. Die Geschichte der Korruption. Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis ins 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfrut am Main: Fischer, 2014. Engels, Jens Ivo, Frédéric Monier and Natalie Petiteau, eds. La politique vue d’en bas. Pratiques privées et débats publics 19e–20e siècles. Paris: A. Colin, 2011. Fradera, Josep M. Colonias para después de un imperio. Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2005. Frankema, Ewout and Frans Buelens. Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development. The Belgian Congo and the Netherlands Indies Compared. London: Routledge, 2013. Huetz de Lemps, Xavier. L’archipel des épices. La corruption de l’administration espagnole aux Philippinnes (fin XVIIIe–fin XIXe siècle). Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2006. Johnston, Michael. “The Search for Definitions: The Vitality of Politics and the Issue of Corruption.” International Social Science Journal 48, no. 3 (1996): 321–335. Kagan, Richard. “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain.” American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (1996): 423–446. Kroeze, Ronald, André Vitória and Guy Geltner, eds. Anticorruption in History. From Antiquity to the Modern Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Luis, Jean-Philippe. “Les employés: une horde prédatrice?” In L’état dans ses colonies. Les administrateurs de l’empire espagnol au XIX siècle, 227–252. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2015.

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Luis, Jean-Philippe. “Les magistrats d’outre-mer (1820–1898).” In L’état dans ses colonies. Les administrateurs de l’empire espagnol au XIX siècle, edited by Jean-Philippe Luis, 189–210. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2015. Luis, Jean-Philippe, ed. L’état dans ses colonies. Les administrateurs de l’empire espagnol au XIX siècle. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2015. Moreno Luzón, Javier. “Political Clientelism, Elites and Caciquismo in Restoration Spain.” European History Quarterly 37, no. 3 (July 2007): 417–441. Patel, Kiran Klaus. “An Emperor Without Clothes? The Debate About Transnational History Twenty-Five Years On.” Histoire@Politique, nº 26 (mai–août 2015): 1–16. Quiroz, Alfonso W. “Implicit Costs of Empire: Bureaucratic Corruption in Nineteenth-Century Cuba.” Journal of Latin American Studies 35 (2003): 473–511. Roldán de Montaúd, Inés. “El final de la presencia española en Cuba: últimas aportaciones historiográficas.” Ayer 55 (1994): 265–297. Roldán de Montaúd, Inés. “La carrera de un alto funcionario moderado en Cuba: Vicente Vázquez Queipo (1804–1893).” In L’état dans ses colonies. Les administrateurs de l’empire espagnol au XIX siècle, edited by Jean-Philippe Luis, 137–156. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2015. Roniger, Luis. “Patron-Client Relationships, Anthropology Of.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, 1118–1120. Oxford and New York: Elsevier, 2001. Rosenmüller, Christoph, ed. Corruption in the Iberian Empires. Greed, Custom and Colonial Networks. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Schneider, Elena A. The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World. Williamsburg and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Tavares, Pedro and Javier Moreno Luzón, eds. De las urnas al hemiciclo. Elecciones y parlamentarismo en la Península Ibérica (1875–1926). Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2015. Yun Casalilla, Bartolomé. Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe, 1415–1668. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

CHAPTER 10

“Putting an End to the Slander That Stains Everything”: Víctor Balaguer and Anti-Corruption Strategies in Late Nineteenth-Century Cuba Gemma Rubí

Corruption in Light of Overseas Ministry Policies In the late nineteenth century, in an age of imperial expansion, Spain had already abandoned this course of action since the independence processes of its American colonies. From its erstwhile vast empire, there it retained only Cuba, where slavery brought forth huge benefits both for slave traders and for sugar cane (and to a smaller extent coffee and tobacco) planters, as well as for the shrunken metropolitan coffers. During

Letter from Víctor Balaguer to Sabas Marin, Governor general of Cuba, 28 August 1887, Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN), Ultramar península, 2482, 22. G. Rubí (B) PICEC-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Kroeze et al. (eds.), Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era, Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9_10

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the 1860s, slavery started to experience a gradual decay while Cuban economy was reorienting itself towards US markets, and the colonial government began a major shift in its policies. It shall be noted that Spain did not lose Cuba at the end of 1898 as a result of war against the United States, but because of a gradual loosening of its bonds with the island that started especially during the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878). Since then, insurrectional attempts at overthrowing Spanish rule continued to thrive alongside political opposition. That brings us to an important question: was this estrangement the direct result of a faulty way of ruling the colony, or was it because of corruption that Cubans attempted to become independent? Perhaps both are true at the same time. Corruption was usually the main reason for secession according to independentist and autonomist partisans themselves. On the 19 July 1887, Víctor Balaguer drew a terrible picture of the colonial administration: “In a relatively short period of time bonds, pay slips, drawbacks, stamps, bank notes, files, minutes, certifications, university degrees, relations … lottery tickets have been forged.1 All these forgeries have been made to dilapidate the public purse (…)”. Balaguer was an overseas minister who put all of his energy into the fight against corruption; maybe the only politician who risked his very career in this endeavour. This experience was the background of reforms which tried to introduce his successor, Antonio Maura (1853–1925), between 1892 and 1894. In contrast, corruption remained a major player in Cuban economic and political life until independence. It is necessary to wonder as well whether the kind of rent-seeking and moral turpitudes that happened on the island were similar to the very metropolitan corruption, or different in nature. Were the governmental challenges in Cuban society and other colonial empires alike? Moreover, was corruption considered a major or minor challenge back then? What did happen was that Spain used budgetary and tariff policies as instruments of economic subordination.2 These are not easy questions to answer, given that very little research has been done about political corruption in nineteenth-century Spanish colonies (conversely, there has been a greater amount of research about corruption in Early Modern Spain), and that in any case anti-corruption phenomena have hardly been the main focus of historiography.3 On the other hand, bibliography about the Spanish Empire from a cultural perspective has existed for a longer time, and has allowed comparisons between it and other contemporaneous and subsequent empires. This has

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in turn provided for the emergence of a new Atlantic paradigm since the 1980s, to explain wars, revolutions and independences throughout America, and specifically in the Spanish colonies.4 In parallel to the approach adopted in this book, the more useful interpretative framework is the one which sets an overview about the colonial world that is attentive to metropolitan–colony relationships, while acknowledging interactions between different colonies from a Spanish perspective (Puerto Rico, Cuba in the Antilles and the distant Philippine islands).5 This framing also includes the way colonial government was understood in Madrid: a domestic issue that influenced both internal and colonial policy. At the same time, colonial rule was a major foreign policy factor, given that Cuban colonial imbroglio triggered immediate reactions in North America, and quickly became entangled with fights against contraband, as well as frequent quarrelling and infightings with exiled Cuban secessionists. Spanish colonial policy was sometimes experimental, as in the timid reforms that were applied to metropolitan legislation in Puerto Rico (something always easier to enforce there than in the rebellious Cuba). Also, in the transfer population policies that were first attempted in the Philippines and later on, as a corrected and increased measure against dissidence, in Cuba during the re-concentrations.6 Policies were generally set up in the overseas ministry bureaus, which were also responsible for finding the resources needed to implement them, which were always scarce and essentially limited to the maintenance of public order and of the colonial administration’s proper functioning. Nevertheless, the political impact of these policies was forcefully heard inside Parliament when there were debates about reform initiatives or budget amendments presented by MPs from colonial constituencies. This was also the case outside Parliament, when public officials went to the press to convey wrathful or worried messages. The study of political corruption—which should be understood as a social phenomenon in a given historical and culture environment— requires, as it is upheld by the “New Corruption History”, a double sight. In short: perceptions and discourses on the one hand, and the study of social practices on the other. In that sense, it is important to identify a specific role that was exerted by these practices, what happened when they were denounced by critical actors, how were the normative systems affected in those cases and to what extent scandals and uneasiness brought forth a modernisation of governance. The time has come for corrupt practices and critical speeches to be analysed alongside anti-corruption

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strategies.7 In order to do so we must focus our attention on historical subject and micropolitics, something that requires an attentive analysis of primary sources and basic documentary evidences.8 Otherwise we may be at risk of offering an argument which identifies imperial worldviews with corruption, regardless of the critical evaluation of political leaders and economic or financial elites in the name of conflicting public moralities. Additionally, there is the potential risk of overrating—i.e. taking out of context—the allegations of public actors who have spoken out against corruption.9 What was the real role of corruption in this colonial governance? Was it a practice akin to the ones that were in use during the Ancien Régime? Was it the lubricant which allowed the clientelist system to function as it did in the Peninsula? Was it the battering ram used by the opposition against the Spanish party in order to push for secession? Was it a way to embezzle resources in an economy already decimated by a sky-high tax burden? We know of merely two ministers who were determined to decidedly carry out anti-corruption strategies: Víctor Balaguer and Antonio Maura. The former ostensibly failed in this fight, while the latter failed to carry on political autonomy demands, because the corruption itself had not been reined in, nor had the Spanish authorities recovered their reputation. Corruption denunciation was thus at the heart of political legitimacy debates. In case this Latin American history might be mainly the history of Spain in America—something which marks a difference with British or French colonisation—would the corruption modalities be those exported from Spain to Cuba? Would those practices be a consequence of the absence of control because of distance, lack of a rationalised and effective bureaucracy and officeholders’ rapacity? May administrative turpitude be a structural symptom of a barely professionalised administration, in a rational-technical sense, where both the recruitment and positive actions of officeholders result from political non-meritocratic criteria? Or perhaps a signal of a decaying administration?10 There are studies which show that corruption was a permanent feature in the evolution of the Cuban administrative apparatus, a feature which was fed by the opacity, impunity and embezzlement that followed the outbreak of the Ten Years’ War. This is another reason for us to ask about the administrative corruption character after the island was pacified, as well as about the usefulness of corruption denunciation. It was against this background that a minister entered the scene, who was personally

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convinced that the perception of corruption in Spanish institutions was a burden to political legitimacy and a hindrance to colonial governance.

The Cuban Government, Afar from the Overseas Ministry Serving as overseas minister meant choosing the ministerial portfolio that nobody wanted, chiefly because it was both a difficult task to handle and a hard one to succeed in. It used to be a chance to gather experience as well, and many junior politicians who sat in government for the first time were assigned this position. This very portfolio, in charge of colonial affairs, was created by royal decree on the 20 May 1863 with the purpose of centralising the administration of colonial territories in the “mother country”, except for the matters related to state, war and navy departments.11 This creation took place long after the end of the imperial crisis, concluding with the loss of continental America during the 1810s, but indicates the persistency of an imperial idea given that the colonial government was regarded as an extension of domestic policy.12 Víctor Balaguer i Cirera (1824–1901) was a Catalan politician who served thrice as overseas minister.13 His main governmental experience was thus acquired as overseas minister, despite his being also development minister for three weeks in 1872.14 Nonetheless, the experience—as he himself recorded in his diary, where he could confide his thoughts more intimately—of his last tenure as overseas minister left him disappointed and disenchanted. This was the reason why in November 1891 he did not want to consider the possibility of becoming a minister again, let alone being in charge of colonial possessions.15 Balaguer’s reasons were numerous, but he acknowledged that administrative immorality— i.e. corruption inside the colonial administration—played an important role: “My zeal of public interests made me abandon my fellow comrades and my determination to go after immoralities made me gain several foes. Ever since a lot of hatred against me has existed, and it is a hatred that remains and will continue to remain”.16 Ultimately, Balaguer went as far as to concede that being a minister had not turned out to be a great personal benefit and that, far from it, he was totally bankrupt and struggled badly in returning to private life.17 By “administrative immorality” he was alluding to administrative and political corruption, a phenomenon that was known by several names in

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Balaguer’s time: immorality, abuse, irregularity, prevarication, misappropriation, embezzlement or fraud. In common situations, these turpitudes wrought chaos, disorder and bedlam; while in extraordinary circumstances they entangled alarm and public outrage. It was a true handicap that ought to be uprooted. The common ideal that Balaguer and other politicians of his generation were inspired by, was that of building or reforming public administration in the sense of making it moral, more efficient and more professionalised. In short, modern according to the shared view of liberal state construction and Weberian rationalisation of public service. Hence, administrative immorality ought to be avoided or at least restrained so that the principle of authority could remain fully enforced. Furthermore, a second very powerful reason was that the colonial administration might be more efficient at the time of extracting resources, and favouring the metropolitan economic interests. The policies of anti-corruption have barely been analysed, although a significant—albeit partial—amount of investigation has been developed, specially focused on Balaguer’s first two ministerial terms.18 This focusing is appropriate because scholars have usually failed to pay attention to the reasons why some nineteenth-century politicians determined to address political corruption, as well as to the very anti-corruption practices that ran parallel.19 Balaguer embarked upon a real crusade against corruption inside the Spanish administration in Cuba, not only during his first two terms but also during the third one—something which implied the firing of officeholders and the dismantlement of whole sectors, such as the customs field. This policy challenged and stretched the resilience of Spanish governance on the island to the limit, which was already questioned not only by the US-based insurrectionist camp nor by the autonomist party, but by the very heirs of the Spanish party there.

Cuba Island, the Antillean Pearl Cuba and Puerto Rico were the Antillean colonies that, along with the Philippine archipelago, Caroline Islands, Marianne Islands and Palau, were the last remainders of the Spanish Empire, which was almost vanquished as a result of the independency wars that occurred mainly during the 1820s. Cuba was particularly valued as the crown jewel of Spain, tantamount to colonial Algeria for the French Empire.20 Spanish nationalism was nurtured by the wealth that Cuba brought to the Spanish

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crown, especially because of its flourishing economy based on sugarcane tillage on slave-ridden plantations. By 1855, Cuba was contributing to about a third of global sugar production. Therefore, slavery—despite the prohibition of transatlantic slave trade in the British-Spanish Covenant of 1817—remained a profitable business closely related to the survival of Cuban economy. Even so, slavery faded away with the onset of Cuban rebellion in October 1868, which concurred at the same time as the first democratic experience in Spanish history (between 1868 and 1874), and finally disappeared in 1886. During the Ten Years’ War, enslaved Africans or Cubans remained an object of marketing and corruption, but the war blew public debt sky-high and badly increased competition between sugar and beet, which altogether undermined an already dysfunctional colonial economy. The Bourbon Restoration (1875–1923) strengthened Cuban dependency on Spain, which to a certain degree favoured the interests of the Catalan economic elites that Balaguer sought to represent. Protectionist barriers further divided the Criollo elites between a Spanish-centred group and a set of entrepreneurs that looked for foreign markets. During Balaguer’s last term, Cuban society was deeply divided between unionists (status quo defenders), assimilationists who wanted the colonies to become Spanish provinces, regionalists who dreamed of home rule and US unionists or separatists. The Pact of Zanjón, signed in February 1878, allowed the formation of political parties that sent their representatives to the Spanish Parliament, whence they opposed governmental policies without succeeding in implementing the special overseas laws. However, special overseas laws— promised since 1837—were never enacted in one single legislative corpus, although with the ministry of Balaguer new regulations were adapted to the Cuban reality, following those that were already started by its predecessor, Germán Gamazo. In summary, despite the introduction of timid reforms, Cuba remained ruled by centralising administrative criteria and a growing militarisation of metropolitan authorities until the War of Independence (1895–1898).21

Political and Administrative Corruption: A Systemic Vice? The current historiographical consensus states that corruption in Spanish overseas territories during the last two decades of the nineteenth century

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ended up as a ruinous drain on Cuban finances.22 Indeed, corruption struck a mortal blow to the Spanish domination of Cuba both because of financial plundering, and because of ideological and institutional undermining that ran parallel. It was already a deeply felt phenomenon back then, especially in Cuban literature, which described the corrupt networks that connected Madrid with the island.23 Francisco Moreno, in his work “El país del chocolate”24 , portrays a grotesque caricature of Spanish bureaucratic inefficiency while referring to the “rampant corruption” that seemed to flourish everywhere.25 Dissident public intellectuals and politicians, both autonomists and independentists, also used corruption to strengthen their critical stand against Spanish rule. Even though administrative corruption had been going on for more than a century, this vice acquired huger proportions during the Ten Years’ War. Alfonso Quiroz proved that corruption amounted then to 50% of Cuba’s fiscal budget, while between 1880 and 1890 it gradually went down. Nevertheless, it remained consistently around twenty per cent during the first decades of independence,26 a fact that Quiroz ascribes more to administrative bedlam and feeble institutionalisation than to a persistent colonial cultural heritage. Corrupted employees—the so-called “aves de paso” or “aventureros ” (adventurers) who came to the colonies avid for wealth—bore the main responsibility for corruption according to their contemporaries. In fact, save for some clerks and junior officials of the administration, most public servants came from Spain.27 Corrupt employees were, of course, part of the problem. However, it is worth noting the phenomenon of empleomanía; that is the yearning for obtaining a public post with or without having the necessary abilities and worth to fulfil it properly. This phenomenon was a blatant example of Spanish political clientelism or caciquismo, which was itself a direct expression of the kind of political relationship that existed between the political centre and its periphery, and the “mother country” and its colonies. Joaquim Bartra was a close confidant of Balaguer and was public officer in Cuba during most of his life. In their continuous correspondence, when Bartra re-joined the General Accounting Office on the 25 October 1887, he stated that: “Cuba had no remedy". Bartra went on to explain that the intendant did not enjoy solid authority, power was held by the so-called “camarillas ” (power groups) and employees went three months without receiving their salary.28 Later on, Bartra admitted that he could no longer continue with the investigation into the significant fraud that

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was long since being committed inside the lottery administration, and that it was a very sensitive matter that should not fall into the hands of the autonomists. Ironically, this faithful employee could not avoid being convicted of corruption. Spanish governments consistently failed to set up a non-partisan administrative apparatus. Hence there was no clear distinction between politics and public officiality, and this brought about much of the increase of clientele relationships that happened during those years. Far from it, the Bourbon Restoration regime based its stability upon the alternation of power between the two principal liberal families (the Conservatives and the Liberals), the “dynastic turn” and their fellow friends and clienteles.29 In short, governmental fraud and electoral corruption became part of the ethos of Spanish Restoration and thwarted further extensions of political citizenry. According to Cuban autonomist Raimundo Cabrera, corruption causes were threefold, to wit: slavery, despotic military regime and “the invasion, the hustle and bustle of employees who, without wealth, without families, without attachment towards the soil, come and quit our cities, moved only by the ambition to quickly amass a fortune without caring about the vicious and pernicious example they have set as the sole remainder of their being here”. Cabrera further stated that corruption was the source of the shortage of schools and public instruction and, more broadly speaking, of very each Cuban trouble.30 Change in Cuban colonial administration was a common and heated topic during Balaguer’s third term as overseas minister, and it had been debated since the early 1860s. Back then, two major problems conditioned Cuban political life: public insecurity (increased by the upsurge of bandit gangs that plundered, stole, kidnapped and then got off scot-free) and corruption (called then administrative immorality, which also included contraband).31 To solve the latter problem, several proposals were considered: a legislative change to diminish the number of employees while increasing their income, and hard punishments to deal fraud and other misdemeanours. Many a corrupt arrangement was commonly practiced at the time: indiscriminate seizures, forgery of state seals, bribes in exchange for clearing debts, commodities that went through customs without paying duties, or deceptive schemes in expenses and inventories. We could very well add the “environmental corruption” to this criminal string, which bedevilled the financial situation of the

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island. Further afflictions included the resources lost in currency conversion speculation, the ban on creating Cuban banks, persistent smuggling as well as Spanish employees’ and soldiers’ earnings that were paid by Cuban Government.32 A scandalous example was the profits obtained by the family of the second Marquis de Comillas (Claudio López Bru (1853–1925) through the Transatlántica Corporation and the Banco Hispano colonial. In 1880, this credit corporation granted a loan to the Spanish government to cover the public debt.33 The interest was paid thanks to the income from customs, the main income item. Those monopoly concessions were a fruitful way for contractors and businessmen to enrich themselves. One of the best Cuban novels of the time, Ramón Meza y Suárez Inclán’s “Mi tío el empleado” (1888), describes this series of corrupt praxes through the ventures of an unscrupulous Spanish employee, who grows and thrives in Cuba and is finally ennobled.34

The Limits of Anti-corruption Strategies The fight against corruption led by civil servants was one of Balaguer’s main issues as a politician. From his charges as the president of the Court of Auditors (from July 1874 to January 1875), and as a member of the Inspection Commission of the Debt, Balaguer made a lot of effort to persecute such fraudulent practices. After being chosen to become the minister of overseas territories, he came up against some irregularities committed by public servants in the Cuban administration, which were to some extent the heritage of those that he prosecuted in 1874. Historian Gwenaëlle Colez has examined in detail the measures that Balaguer tried to implement during the “six revolutionary years” (1868– 1874), especially those measures set about in 1874.35 Convinced by the Captain General Joaquín Jovellar Soler (1819–1892), who considered the Cuban administration the most corrupt out of all the administrations, Balaguer’s main aim was to stabilise Cuban public finances, affected by the war, and to reform the justice system—a task in which he repeatedly failed despite his efforts.36 The first goal was a fight fated to lose. If corruption was rooted in the administration of Spain the deepness of fraudulent and illicit practices was harsh to prosecute on an island so far away from surveillance. The second reform was impossible to achieve because of the legal framework: Balaguer could not simply remove the court officials.

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Only the governor general, the highest ranking official in Cuba (a post created by a decree issued on the 22 April 1874), could replace them. In that year, the customs revenue collection and the administration of lottery were two domains particularly eroded by the racketeering activities led by Mariano Cancio Villamil (1824–1894), the general manager of public finances. Bartra the trustworthy informant of Balaguer in this delegation, branded all those who owned “the key of the monopoly which allowed them the power to dispose of huge sums of money and, hence, overcome obstacles” as “bandits”.37 Cancio Villamil, along with his wife, was involved in a case of fraud concerning the administration of lotteries. He was not penalised; instead of him, one of his underlings was punished and sentenced to seven years in prison. We totally agree with Colez about Balaguer’s unawareness—a curious lack of information considering that he wanted to oust the civil servants under suspicion. The problem was the huge gap between the dates that the crime was committed and the course of the proceedings (a gap of between ten and fourteen years). Despite all of this, we disagree about the fact that Balaguer gave up in his crusade against corruption during his third term, or that he only kept on fighting against it in the Parliament as a deputy for Vilanova i la Geltrú. During these two years, he was the target of criticism by certain newspapers. Moreover, he had to deal with a torrent of questions in the Congress of Deputies and in the Senate. Thus, he had a strong confrontation with General Manuel de Salamanca Negrete (1831–1890) in the Senate at the end of 1887.38 General Salamanca aspired to occupy the post of governor general of the island after the resignation of general Emilio Calleja Isasi (1830– 1906), who had located fake debt securities. Both militaries pretended to fight against administrative abuses. Balaguer preferred to designate another individual as a governor general: Sabas Marín González (1831– 1901). Meanwhile, General Salamanca quarrelled with Balaguer because of his anti-corruption strategies when he pointed to “scandals, horrors, miseries and corruption”.39 Salamanca accused Balaguer of doing nothing against corruption until he has started his campaign, and during the war, he had become the spokesman for those unhappy with government policy in Cuban affairs. Salamanca obtained the same post between March 1889 and February 1890, when he tried to introduce a new colonising policy on the island. He died in strange circumstances. His detractors were very powerful—mainly and curiously the group linked to the Trasatlántica

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Corporation and the Banco Hispano colonial, as well as the landowners disgusted by the policy of migratory colonisation.40 In the memorandum about his last term, Balaguer was convinced that the solution to fraud management involved reorganising the Ministry of Overseas Territories (a reform that he put into practice in 1874). Otherwise, abolishing its representation in the Antillean colonies was “something that can only be carry out with caution and with sufficient time in order to prevent worse evils”. 41 However, there were some measures that fell by the wayside. This is the case of the creation of an Information and Investigation Board that had to be made up of all the political parties and other social representatives. PM Práxedes Mateo Sagasta aborted this initiative because “the governor general whom we have just invested with a very large vote of confidence would be offended, since the appointment of a commission would be tantamount to withdrawing that confidence from him, deliberately making him unfit to carry out that same investigation by the ordinary means proper to his office which he now exercises with our applause, as we have just told him".42 To summarise, Balaguer envisaged, albeit with limitations, to put an end to patronages, replacing it with a process of nomination of civil servants based on entirely meritocratic criteria, and to a reform of the customs duty in order to prevent contraband. Due to the commotion that any kind of reform aroused in the political arena, he was aware that prior to eliminating fraud, changing political habits was a must in order “to not harm other sacred interests and to not encounter insurmountable difficulties in the chamber that hinders it or that turn it into a sterile effort”.43 Reforming the penal code as it was done during 1863 and 1864 was insufficient. This time, the main aim was not to prosecute criminal behaviours, but to radically transform the administration of the colony.44 Standing out among the measures suggested by Balaguer in order to rein in corruption were: the need to collect contributions on time because of the damages that the frequent delays were causing to the island economy; the reduction in the number of officeholders; the establishment of a permanent monitoring of customs fraud (after the assault of the Matanzas official, he appointed a new customs general overseer on the 9th April); and even the creation of a committee of inquiry that had been proposed by the opposition. The declaration of laid-off employees and public appointments became a policy to consider during cabinet meetings. In addition to the administrative corruption problem, there were issues with political

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clientelism and empleomanía. The minister was assaulted by floods of petitions coming from deputies, senators and other high officials who wanted to pull strings to hire their protégés in the colonial administration. In the balance of power and patronage during the Restoration, the minister has no choice but to set up all those required with a job. Nevertheless, he did this without reluctance: privately, he usually withdrew the petitions which were voided a posteriori; he was aware that cronyism was one of the main causes behind the administrative corruption.45 In his own words, the government had to take difficult actions in order to avoid a bigger disaster: the loss of the colony, a fear that upset lots of his contemporaries. For this reason, we maintain the hypothesis that Balaguer shifted his strategy, which became a real obsession. Meanwhile there remained in force the assimilationist policy, which aimed at maintaining territorial integrity. Without overlooking the problems derived from corruption, he preferred to progress in these assimilationist politics in order to maintain the integrity of the territory. As a former Cuban representative who had hope in Balaguer’s term stated, building railways was a far better option because they “contribute positively to national prosperity and they assure better than bayonets and canons the unity of the fatherland”.46 During his last term, Balaguer’s political decisions were oscillated between a political deadlock and a reformist will. In contrast with his opinions concerning the benefits of an administrative decentralisation for Catalonia, his policy for Cuba involved introducing and adapting peninsular laws in the Cuban context.47 He tried to make his party look good with efforts around legislate for individual rights that were not implemented enough in the constitution of 1876, such as freedom of the press, new right to association, civil marriage and the universal suffrage for men.48 In the name of his party, Balaguer created a specific advisory council for overseas issues, he converted Cuban debts and he set about reforming the customs duties. Moreover, he suppressed the sugar export tax and he tried to put an end to banditry. 49 However, banditry became more widespread from 1889 onwards.50 Fighting against corruption in Cuba during the second half of the century meant fighting for a certain public morality; that is to say, to fight against the normative consensus which restricted what was considered a proper governance.51 The main goal was preventing any scandal in which politicians and high officials were involved and, hence, avoiding political disgrace. In fact, public morality was thus reduced to a problem of public order, prestige

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and external image. In a context where corrupt practices were deeply rooted in the Cuban administration, to watch over the officeholders’ proper behaviour was quite an issue. Every time fraudulent practices were noticed, especially in customs where the ministry sent qualified employees from the metropolis, Balaguer initiated disciplinary proceedings.52 However, the system of justice protected these kinds of abuses, as the complaints he received show. The eagerness to set out economic reforms and to spread the progress led him to establish a contract, approved by the State Council, with the Trasatlántica Corporation concerning the postal service and seaborne transport. Republican MPs, as well as Cuban supporters of autonomy, led a bitter opposition in Parliament. They reproached him for awarding the company without a public tender; Balaguer was accused of having bestowed preferential treatment to the Catalan company. From his point of view, any company—except the one awarded—was able to take charge of the service. In the end, in his opinion, it was a matter of state, but it was also the result of the pressure network that the businessman Antonio López, Marquis of Comillas—the owner of the naval company—had built for years with the complicity of Liberal politicians, senior government officials and the Crown.53

Conclusions The problem concerning the corruption in Cuba marked each of Balaguer’s terms. Some months after he left office, all of the public servants appointed by him—who worked hard to fight against fraud, and thanks to whom the income of the Cuban treasury increased—were dismissed by Minister Manuel Becerra.54 On the 14 June 1888, Balaguer tendered his resignation to Sagasta, while giving warning about the lack of interest the government was showing in overseas issues. In fact, he could not bear the pressure of being constantly in the eye of the storm.55 Balaguer was aware of the existing limitations when it came to making the colonial administration more ethical, but he also knew that denouncing corruption was a major political weapon. He confessed his impotence in controlling freedom of expression, which as a liberal right he could not curtail, despite on some occasions criticism and complaints were expressly magnified. In this sense, the politicisation of the denunciation of corruption anticipated that which took place in Spain after the political crisis of 1898.56 He was too old to travel around the island to analyse its

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problems from a bottom-up perspective. According to him, resignation was the only way to end his term and with it a more interventionist way of exerting colonial policy, akin to what was being done by other European countries.57 His resignation disturbed the Cuban public opinion, which was aware of the improvements in the fight against corruption made during Balaguer’s term.58 Balaguer was torn between his will to fight corruption and to build a broad consensus to legitimise colonial rule. His crusade against corruption weakened autonomist claims against metropolitan rule, but it also enraged the Spanish faction: the Constitutional Union party was soon plunged into a crisis amid increasing internal divisions. Officeholders’ dismissals prompted factional criticism and undermined the sacred rule by which public officials were made redundant only after governmental changes, and never because of poor job performance. The aggrieved workers used the press and the streets to maximise their complaints, while Balaguer admitted to neither having friendly journalists nor attempting to bribe any. Anti-corruption efforts failed in uprooting such a phenomenon, but they reined in corruption and brought it to a lower level that was compatible with the dependent economic system which linked the colony to the metropolis. This precarious balance was a main matter of concern. Was it possible to deal with corrupt officeholders with such a rigidity without introducing comprehensive changes to the island’s political structure? The governor general brought political and military powers together despite the push made by several officeholders to separate both offices. Political legitimacy was the main priority because it was a guarantee of law and order, not only against banditry (usually related to secessionist filibustering) but also for fighting contraband and—more importantly—for putting public finances on a sound footing. The outcome was the instrumentalisation of the fight against corruption in order to gain credibility, and downgrade opposition demands. Balaguer was widely thought to be an honest politician by his contemporaries, and he himself was convinced that no one was more committed to reforming the Cuban colonial administration than he was. He tried to fight against recommendations, but he had to decide which ones should be accepted and which ones rejected, because patronage had become so deeply enrooted that it was impossible to deal with either colonial or metropolitan administration without making use of it. Nonetheless, instead of decentralising the administration by hiring Cuban officeholders,

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he chose to guarantee territorial integrity and public order. Retrospectively, this was the biggest limitation of his tenure of office. After the end of the long-lasting liberal government of Sagasta (1885–1890), the authoritarian colonial policy that was deeply rooted in the Spanish tradition returned, only to be rejected by Antonio Maura during his term (1892–1894), in order to favour an autonomist and reforming approach. It was too little too late. The War of Independence started in 1895, and ended with a complete separation between Spain and the Caribbean pearl in 1898. Ultimately, fraud and corruption remained in several sections of the Cuban administration because they were the result of the way Spain exerted its sovereignty in Cuba. Corruption could be a symptom of the administration being in decay, a consequence of war and/or reckless abandon by authorities, but also a signal of the will to protect local producers against peninsular privileges. However, it was—most of all—a powerful argument in order to erode Spanish sovereignty and its dream of a Spanish America. Fighting corruption was an urgent matter during the last Balaguer term if state authority was to be upheld and legitimised in front of a belligerent public. This is why the core issue was the arrangement of the administration, both by hiring employees (“inteligentes, honrados y leales”), and by asking to account for corrupt officeholders in order to bring them to justice.59 Five years before independence, the fight against corruption in the colonial discourse was still a sign of sovereignty and of the Spanish governmental authority. In short, it continued to have a performative dimension, similar to the “ethical policy” argued by Wilhelmina of the Netherlands (in 1901) as a source of legitimacy in the Dutch colonies.60 However, the complaints about corruption became increasingly useful to justify decentralisation in the eyes of Cuban public opinion.61 At the end of the day, denouncing corrupt practices was a useful tool both for Cuban opposition and for the colonial government. There is an important issue which remains, awaiting more comprehensive investigation: the analysis of value conflicts related to similarities and differences in interpreting the legislation (special laws), intrinsic to other colonial settings, such as the Dutch, the French or the British contexts.

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Notes 1. 19 July 1887, AHN, Ultramar península, 2482, 22. 2. Carmen Barcia, “De la reestructuración a la crisis: la sociedad cubana a finales del siglo XIX.” Historia contemporánea 19 (1999): 129–153. 3. Among others: Ponce, Pilar, and Francisco Andújar, ed., Mérito, venalidad y corrupciòn en España y América, siglos XVII y XVIII (Valencia: Albatros Editorial, 2016); Christophe Rosenmüller and Stephen Ruderer ed. Rosenmüller, Christoph, and Stephan Ruderer, eds., “Dádivas, dones y dineros”: aportes a una nueva historia de la corrupción en América Latina desde el imperio español a la modernidad (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2016); Christoph Rosenmüller, ed., Corruption in the Iberian Empires. Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks (Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017). For a recent compendium about anticorruption phenomena, see Ronald Kroeze, André Vitoria and Guy Geltner, eds., Anticorruption in History. From Antiquity to Modern Era. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 4. A very fitting example is Christopher Schmidt-Novara and John NietoPhilips eds., Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends (Albuquerque: University of New York Press, 2005). For a comparative vision focusing on colonial cultures (which unfortunately does not analyse the Spanish Empire), see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stolen, eds. Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). For a recent study with a comparative global history perspective, see Jorge Cañizares and Erik R. Seeman, eds., The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000. 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2018). See, also: Luengo, Jorge and Pol Dalmau, “Writing Spanish History in the Global Age: Connections and Entanglements in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Global History 13 (2018): 425–445. 5. See Chapters 9 (Pol Dalmau) and 12 (Xavier Huetz de Lemps) in this book. 6. Javier Morillo-Alicea. “Uncharted Landscapes of Latin America. The Philippines in the Spanish Imperial Archipelago.” In Interpreting Spanish colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends, ed. Christopher Smith-Novara and John M. Nieto-Philips (Albuquerque, NM: University of New York Press, 2005), 25–53. 7. Jens Ivo Engels, “La nueva historia de la corrupción. Algunas reflexiones sobre la historiografía de la corrupción política e los siglos XIX y XX,” In Modernización y corrupción política en la Europa contemporánea, ed. Frédéric Monier and Gemma Rubí. Ayer. Revista de historia contemporánea 115, no. 3 (2019): 23–49.

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8. This chapter is part of a research project by the National Historical Archive (Madrid), the Víctor Balaguer’s Library (Barcelona), Archivo de Indias (Seville), Archive of the Antonio Maura Foundation (Madrid), National Library of Spain, Consejo de Estado Library and National Archives (London). 9. Frédéric Monier, and Gemma Rubí. “Los favores y los sermones.” Presentation of dossier “Modernización y corrupción política en la Europa contemporánea,” Ayer. Revista de Historia contemporánea 115, no. 3 (2019): 13–21. 10. The concept of political corruption may be related to the definition provided by Joseph Nye referring to the civil servants’ corrupt behaviour: “behaviour which deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of private-regarding (close family, personal, private clique) pecuniary or status gains; or violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private-regarding influence,” Joseph Nye, “Corruption and Political Development: A Cost–Benefit Analysis,” American Political Science Review 16 (1967): 417. 11. The overseas ministry took care of subjects related to grace and justice, home affairs, treasury and development, David González, La administración central para el gobierno de ultramar. Ministerio de Ultramar, 1863–1899 (Madrid, Universidad Pontificia de Comillas, 2014), 20–22. 12. Consuelo Naranja, ed., Historia de Cuba (Madrid: CSIC, 2009); Luis Miguel García Mora, “Cuba, de la emergencia de la nacionalidad a la independencia (1868–1898),” in La Administración de Cuba en los siglos XVIII y XIX , ed. Javier Alvarado (Madrid: CEC-BOW, 2017), 69–106; Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire, 1898–1923 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Alfred Mccoy, Josep M. Fradera and Stephen Jacobson eds., Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, European’s Eclipse, America’s Decline (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). 13. Víctor Balaguer i Cirera (1824–1901) was a poet, literate, historian and a politician. His long political career started as a Progressive party member. He was president of Deputation of Barcelona (1868–1869) and MP for Vilanova i la Geltrú constituency also in Barcelona province, between 1871 and 1889, when he became senator. He was also president of the Council of State, the Court of Auditors and he held different positions in various administrative institutions (Joan Palomas, “Diputat revolucionari, senador vitalici: l’actuació parlamentària de Víctor Balaguer.” In Víctor Balaguer i el seu temps, edited by Montserrat Comas, 131– 196. (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2004); Marina Cuccu, Víctor Balaguer i Cirera (1824–1901). (Vilanova i la Geltrú: Ajuntament de Vilanova i la Geltrú, 2003). His heritage and legacy remain in the Library-Museum that he created in Vilanova in 1884, which nowadays keeps a collection of 40,177 letters (Montserrat Comas, “L’epistolari

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14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

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de Víctor Balaguer. Gestió, ús i potencial historiogràfic d’un document excessiu,” Cercles. Revista d’Història Cultural 19 (2016): 29–53. The first term as overseas minister was during the reign of Amadeus of Savoy (5th May 1871–21st December 1871). He served again for four and a half months in 1874, during the military presidency of Marshall Serrano (3rd January 1874–13th May 1874). The third term, the longest (10th October 1886–14th June 1888) was at the beginning of Maria Christina’s regency, and under the lengthy government led by LiberalFusionist Práxedes Mateo Sagasta. Biblioteca Museu Víctor Balaguer, Diaries: 1891 and January to May 1892. Signature: 5 Ms. 1037. The reference is from November 25, 1891. Ibid. Ibid.: “When I left the ministry I felt it was really difficult for me to get back my place in boards and directorates, so I had to work for a living, without being able to serve [illegible word] of the Museum-Library of Vilanova i la Geltrúh.” Gwénaëlle Colez, “Víctor Balaguer y la Cuba Española: colonialismo e intereses materiales en la construcción nacional del siglo XIX” (PhD diss., Universitat Jaume I (Castelló de la Plana), published as Víctor Balaguer. Cuba y la construcción de la identidad nacional española (Madrid: Centro de estudios políticos y constitucionales, 2020), 169–185, especially the paragraph: “La moralización de la Administración” from Chapter 3 (“El Sexenio Revolucionario: los mandatos de Víctor Balaguer en el ministerio de ultramar”). Empirical working papers about political corruption in Cuba written by Alfonso Quiroz are utterly essential to draw a conclusion that afterwards can be nuanced with analyses, like the one formulated by Xavier Huetz de Lemps, “Las metástasis imperiales de la corrupción en la España de la Restauración,” In La Corrupción política en la España contemporánea. Un enfoque interdisciplinar, ed. Borja de Riquer, Joan Lluís Pérez-Francesch, Gemma Rubí, Lluís Ferran Toledano and Oriol Lujan (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2018), 317–330. For several years, my research group “Politics, Institutions and Corruption in Modern time” has been working inside the parameters of the New History of Corruption, a historiographical current that has appeared in Europe during the last decade. For a balanced historiographical view on corruption in modern Spain, see Gemma Rubí, Borja de Riquer and Lluís Ferran Toledano, “Más allá del escándalo. La corrupción política en la España contemporánea,” In La Corrupción política en la España contemporànea. Un enfoque interdisciplinar, ed. Borja de Riquer, Joan Lluís Pérez-Francesch, Gemma Rubí, Lluís Ferran Toledano and Oriol Lujan (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2018), 47–80. See Chapter 8 (Didier Guignard) in this book.

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21. Josep M. Fradera, “Por qué no se promulgaron las leyes especiales de Ultramar?” In Gobernar Colonias, edited by Josep M. Fradera (Barcelona: Península, 1999), 71–94. 22. Huetz de Lemps, “Las metástasis imperiales de la corrupción en la España de la Restauración,” 2018, 326. 23. See, as an example, this quotation of Juan Gualberto Gómez. La cuestión de Cuba en 1884: historia y soluciones de los partidos cubanos. (Madrid: Imprenta de Aurelio J. Alaria, 1885), 85–86. “Cuba is dying. The lack of liberty is destroying its energies. The lack of apparent responsibility is killing its virtues. The lack of a good administrative regime is undermining its wealth. The lack of a liberal tariff system is depleting its trade. If we want to save Cuba, we must redress these wrongs immediately by filling in the vacuum that everyone perceives. And frankly, that cannot be accomplished with a democracy which stands for a common identity with Spain”. 24. Francisco Moreno, El país del chocolate. La inmoralidad en Cuba. (Madrid: F. García Herrero, 1887). 25. See Dalmau’s Chapter 8 in this book. 26. Alfonso Quiroz, “Corrupción, burocracia colonial y veteranos separatistas en Cuba, 1868–1910.” Revista de Indias 61, no. 221 (2001): 99–112; Alfonso Quiroz, “Implicit Costs of Empire: Bureaucratic Corruption in Nineteenth-Century Cuba.” Journal of Latin America Studies 35, no. 3 (2003): 473–511; Inés Roldán de Montaud, “Corrupción y hacienda colonial en Cuba.” In Las haciendas en el Caribe hispano durante el siglo XIX , ed. Inés Roldán de Montaud (Madrid: CSIC, 2008), 109–128. 27. Juan Gualberto Gómez, La cuestión de Cuba en 1884: historia y soluciones de los partidos cubanos (Madrid: Imprenta de Aurelio J. Alaria, 1885), 98. 28. Biblioteca Museu Víctor Balaguer, Epistolari, Letters from Joaquim Bartra to Víctor Balaguer, October 27th and November 15th 1887. 1334/1403. 29. For the concept “empleomanía” and others related to it, see Gemma Rubí, and Lluís Ferran Toledano “La corrupción general del siglo. Palabras y discursos sobre la corrupción política en la España del siglo XIX,” Ayer. Revista de Historia contemporánea 115, no. 3 (2019): 131–157. For the confusion between politics and administration, see Gemma Rubí, “La représentation de la corruption: l’Espagne dans la construction du libéralisme politique (1840–1868).” In Scandales et corruption à l’époque contemporaine: Les coulisses du politique dans l’Europe contemporaine, ed. Olivier Dard, Jens Ivo Engels, Andreas Fahrmeir and Frédéric Monier (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014), 162–180; Rubí and Toledano, “La corrupción general,” 73–86. See also Luis Miguel Costa, Costa, L. Miguel. “Prácticas corruptas o relaciones de patronazgo.” In “Dádivas, dones y dineros". Aportes a una nueva historia de la corrupción en América Latina desde el imperio español a la modernidad, edited by Christoph

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30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

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Rosenmüller and Stephan Ruderer (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2016), 27–59. And for a state of art about Spanish caciquismo in Bourbon Restoration Spain see José Varela Ortega ed., El poder de la influencia. Geografía del caciquismo en España (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2001) and Javier Moreno, “Political Clientelism, Elites, and caciquismo in Restoration Spain (1875–1923),” European History Quarterly 37 no. 3 (2007): 417–441. Raimundo Cabrera, Cuba y sus jueces. Rectificaciones oportunas (La Habana: Imprenta El Retiro, 1887), 122. A leaflet that defended the interests of Banco Español de Cuba—the most important Cuban credit entity—clearly unsuspicious of autonomism, pointed at these very two problems as the most significant of the period. See Una cuestión de Cuba (Madrid, Tipografía de Manuel G. Hernández), 1888, 13. Other empires’ colonies, the author asserts, “have never been indirect prisons, nor beggary refuges, nor societies founded with so deleterious a vice,” ibid., 8. Roldán de Montaud, “Corrupción y hacienda colonial en Cuba,” 2008, 273–330. Public debt in Cuba grew from seven to 128 million pesos between 1867 and 1876. The family of Marquis of Comillas had made a fortune with the transatlantic transportation of enslaved Africans. Ramon Meza Suárez Valle-Inclán, Mi tío el empleado. (Madrid: Ediciones de cultura hispánica, 1993). See Dalmau’s chapter in this book. Gwénaëlle Colez 2017, 169–185. Joan Palomas, “Víctor Balaguer (1824– 1901) en el Sexenio Revolucionario.” In Figuras de la Gloriosa: aproximación biográfica al Sexenio Democrático, ed. Rafael Serrano García, 30–48 (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 2006), 30–48. In Gwénaëlle Colez 2017: AHN, Ultramar Cuba Insurrección, 4935, 3. In this letter, Jovellar explains to Balaguer that the solution would be to oust three quarters of the magistrates of the l’Havana Court. Letter from Joaquim Bartra to Víctor Balaguer (on 30th September 1874) cited in Gwénaëlle Colez: Epistolari Víctor Balaguer, 1774/1475. Diario de sesiones del Senado, Mandate 1887, sessions of December. Ibid., 19th December 1887, 258. Imilcy Balboa, “Asentar para dominar. Salamanca y la colonización militar. Cuba, 1889–1890.” Tiempos de América. Revista de Historia, cultura y territorio 8 (2001): 29–46. Martín Rodrigo, Los Marqueses de Comillas, 1817–1925, Antonio y Claudia Loriou (Madrid: Editorial LID, 2001). Víctor Balaguer, “De la inmoralidad administrativa en Cuba y de otras cosas.” In En el ministerio de Ultramar, edited by Víctor Balaguer. vol. I (Madrid: Imprenta y Fundición de Manuel Tello, 1888), 250–251. AHN, Ultramar 2482, 22, 14th September 1887. Víctor Balaguer “De la inmoralidad administrativa,” 1888.

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44. Rubí, Gemma, and Ferran Toledano. " Gobierno fuerte, justicia débil. El marco penal de la corrupción en la España contemporánea." In Corrupción política y liberalismo en el largo siglo XIX, edited by María Antonia Peña and Diego Feria.37–51. Granada: Editorial Comares, 2020. 45. A pamphlet written by a former president of the Junta Cubana in Madrid, in which a government was almost autonomously defended, considered that cronyism allowed public servants to get an access to the administration thanks to “the fake hall of the governance system,” José Joaquín de Arrieta, Votos de otro cubano o sea Cuba y España en las presentes circunstancias. (Madrid: Establecimiento tipográfico de José Noguera, 1869), 13. 46. El ferrocarril central de la isla de Cuba por un exdiputado cubano. 1887. (Madrid: Est. Tipográfico “Sucesores de Rivadeneyra”), 50. 47. Balaguer was elected by the Havana constituency as a deputy in the general elections of 1884, and in 1886 for the Constitutional Union Party—a party that defended the interests of the Spanish elites. 48. Jaume Santaló, Víctor Balaguer i la política ultramarina espanyola (1854– 1888) (Barcelona: UPF, 1998). Inés Roldán de Montaud, La Restauración en Cuba: el fracaso de un proceso reformista. (Madrid: CSIC, 2000), 356. 49. Víctor Balaguer, En el Ministerio de Ultramar. 2 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta y Fundición de Manuel Tello, 1888), 15. 50. Imilcy Balboa, “Bandidos y bandidos.” In Diez nuevas miradas de la historia de Cuba, ed. José A. Piqueras (Castelló: Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume I, 1998), 115–150. 51. “Public morality”in this historical context was identified with an upright governance and always in conformity with the law: “no squandering, no luxuries, no embezzlement nor extortion, no nepotism, no immoral patronages.” The public servant owes nothing to any party but the nation. Marcelo Martinez Alcubilla, Diccionario de la administración española, peninsular y ultramarina: compilación ilustrada de la novísima legislación de España en todos los ramos de la administración pública por Marcelo Martínez Alcubilla (1868–1870), 2nd ed. (Madrid: Administración Imprenta de A. Peñuelas, 1868–1870), 446–447. Toon Kerkhoff, Hidden Morals. Explicit Scandals: Public Values and Political Corruption in the Netherlands (1748–1813) (PhD diss., University of Leiden, 2013), 17–35. 52. In a letter sent to the governor general in Cuba (on the 8th November 1886), General Calleja stated: “If their behaviour is not governed by a strict morality and their attitude is not honourable, having any consideration to any public servant, even if they have a high status or they were appointed by distinguished public figures, cannot be contemplated.”

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53. 54. 55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

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Cited in Rafael Alvarez Sereix,"Don Víctor Balaguer y su gestión como ministro de Ultramar,” in Revista contemporánea, Año XIV, Tomo LXXI (July–August-September), 234. DSC, Mandate of 1887, discussions started on 5th March. Joan Palomas 2004, 187–188. Calzada, Germán Gamazo, 149–158. Balaguer was replaced by Trinitario Ruíz Capdepón, whose term lasted a short time. “I made many foes in the ministry, enemies who today take revenge upon me ruthlessly, because I refused to cave in on the indignities that they offered to me.” Víctor Balaguer to Sabas Marín, on the 8th February 1889, AHN, Ultramar península, file 2482, exp. 22. Gemma Rubí, “The Fight Against Corruption and the New Politics in Urban Spain (1890–1923).” In Stadt. Macht. Korruption: Parktiken, Debatten und Wahrnehmungen staen sta890-1923)Ƶption im 19 und 20 Jahrhundert, ed. Jens Ivo Engels, Andreas Fahrmeir, Cesare Mattina and Frédéric Monier, (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlagg, 2017), 99–108. Josep M. Fradera, “Víctor Balaguer i la política colonial española.” In El segle romàntic. Actes del col.loqui sobre el Romanticisme. Vilanova i la Geltrú, 2,3 i 4 de febrer 1995, ed. Montserrat Comas, Manuel Jorba and Antònia Tayadella, (Vilanova: Biblioteca Museu Víctor Balaguer, 1997), 462. José Joaquín Ribó’s biography (Estudios biográficos del exministro de ultramar Exmo. Señor don Víctor Balaguer (Madrid: Imprenta de T. Fortanet, 1876) also praised the efforts of the minister in his fight against corruption in Cuba. Calzada, Germán Gamazo, 93. “intelligent, honest and loyal” employees. Letter from Albert Quintana, secretary of the Cuban governor general, to Víctor Balaguer on the 25th April 1888, Balaguer’s Collection of Letters, 387. See Ronald Kroeze Chapter 7 in this book. This was a widely-shared demand among Cuban society. In January 1893, the Habana Chamber of Commerce president, Ramon de Herrera, reminded Antonio Maura (the recently appointed overseas minister) that “without neglecting affairs of state […] this country has an inherent right to take part in its administration.” Antonio Maura Foundation, File 166/2.

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Roldán de Montaud, Inés. “Corrupción y hacienda colonial en Cuba.” In Las haciendas en el Caribe hispano durante el siglo XIX, edited by Inés Roldán de Montaud, 109–128. Madrid: CSIC, 2008. Rosenmüller, Christoph, and Stephan Ruderer, eds. “Dádivas, dones y dineros”: aportes a una nueva historia de la corrupción en América Latina desde el imperio español a la modernidad. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2016. Rosenmüller, Christoph, ed. Corruption in the Iberian Empires. Greed, custom, and colonial networks. Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. Rubí, Gemma. “La représentation de la corruption: l’Espagne dans la construction du libéralisme politique (1840–1868).” In Scandales et corruption à l’époque contemporaine: Les coulisses du politique dans l’Europe contemporaine, edited by Olivier Dard, Jens Ivo Engels, Andreas Fahrmeir and Frédéric Monier, 162–180. Paris: Armand Colin, 2014. Rubí, Gemma. “The fight against corruption and the new politics in Urban Spain (1890–1923).” In Stadt. Macht. Korruption: Parktiken, Debatten und Wahrnehmungen staädstischer Korruption im 19 und 20 Jahrhundert, edited by Jens Ivo Engels, Andreas Fahrmeir, Cesare Mattina and Frédéric Monier, 99–108. Stuttgart: Steiner Verlagg, 2017. Rubí, Gemma, Borja de Riquer, and Lluís Ferran Toledano. “Más allá del escándalo. La corrupción política en la España contemporánea.” In La corrupción política en la España contemporánea. Un enfoque interdisciplinar, edited by Borja de Riquer, Joan Lluís Pérez-Francesch, Gemma Rubí, Ferran Toledano and Oriol Lujan, 47–80. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2018. Rubí, Gemma, and Lluís Ferran Toledano. “La corrupción general del siglo. Palabras y discursos sobre la corrupción política en la España del siglo XIX.” Ayer. Revista de Historia contemporánea 115, no. 3 (2019): 131–157. Rubí, Gemma, and Ferran Toledano. “Gobierno fuerte, justicia débil. El marco penal de la corrupción en la España contemporánea.” In Corrupción política y liberalismo en el largo siglo XIX , edited by María Antonia Peña and Diego Feria, 37–51. Granada: Editorial Comares, 2020. Santaló, Jaume. Víctor Balaguer i la política ultramarina espanyola (1854–1888). UPF, 1998. Schmitdt-Novara, Christopher, and Nieto-Philips, John, eds. Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends. Albuquerque: University of New York Press, 2005. Una cuestión de Cuba. Madrid: Tipografía de Manuel G. Hernández, 1888. Varela Ortega, José, ed. El poder de la influencia. Geografía del caciquismo en España. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2001.

CHAPTER 11

Paperwork as Commodity, Corruption as Accumulation: Land Records and Licences in Colonial Myanmar, c.1900 Jonathan Saha

Introduction Historians working on corruption have proved adept at tracing the ambivalences and ambiguities of paperwork. This is particularly true for work that focuses on modern colonial states. Studies have identified a certain duality inherent to the nature of paperwork. On the one hand, the bureaucracies established by European imperial forces used written records as tools for maintaining order. State documents such as revenue stamps and licences were used to enact official regulations and to extract legal fees. Taken more widely, paperwork was crucial to disciplinary regimes of punishment, to systems of information gathering, to enabling tax collection, to providing health care, and to a host of other state functions, generating vast archival repositories.1 On the other hand,

J. Saha (B) University of Durham, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected] Durham, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Kroeze et al. (eds.), Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era, Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9_11

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the documents produced by colonial states were unreliable and often suspect. Reliant as they were on the clerical labour of colonised peoples, high-ranking imperial officials were perpetually concerned that written records were being used for malfeasance. The intermediary position of local subordinate state officials was a bureaucratic niche where paperwork could be manipulated. Fabrication and fraud were more than aberrant practices, they were intrinsic to colonial states’ dependence upon written documentation.2 As a result of this duality, studying corruption in the past poses challenges; although as this edition shows, they are far from insurmountable. The archives of the colonial state were structured by officials’ doubts about the veracity and credibility of their own records.3 As a result, as well as examining the content of colonial documents, uncovering corruption in the archive has entailed reconstructing the “social lives” of documents. Historians, such as William Gould working on South Asia and Steven Pierce working on West Africa, have examined how colonial documents were produced and used by colonised peoples working in officialdom in order to benefit from state power in their everyday lives, often at the expense of imperial visions of good governance.4 Building on these insights, my own study of corruption in colonial Myanmar focussed on low-level officials’ misconduct. I argued that this everyday corruption was intrinsic to the colonial state, rather than a bureaucratic pathology. The acts of fraud, rent-seeking, embezzlement and bribery that the British regime uncovered in the delta of Myanmar at the turn of the twentieth century on a near daily basis were central to how the state was experienced by the colonised populace. This was not the state going wrong. To the contrary, many forms of corruption required administrative processes to function. In order to extort a bribe through a false accusation of a crime, the threat of punishment through the court system had to be realistic. It was only worth falsifying settlement maps if subsequent claims to ownership referring to them were seen as plausible. Rather than undermining state power, everyday corruption was how the state was made in everyday life. Corrupt acts were iterated moments of state performativity; quotidian corruption was constitutive of the state.5 I still find these arguments convincing, but increasingly I am aware that this analysis is incomplete. Missing is a historical understanding of subordinate officials’ motivations. There is an assumption that personal gain is a self-evident driver for corruption. This was certainly the view of highranking white British officials who investigated malfeasance. However,

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what constituted personal gain has not been interrogated. The form personal gain took—usually, although not always, money—and the calculation of risk corruption entailed, have not been critically engaged with. These issues have not been addressed because a crucial part of the context is absent from the research. In colonial Myanmar, as in other colonies, the emergence of capitalism was the backdrop for the bureaucratic corruption. For some subordinate officials, acts of bureaucratic malpractice were motivated by the desire to accumulate wealth and personal power. For others, it was a means to supplementing incomes. For others still, it was a method of navigating local rivalries and feuds. But in many of these cases, corruption relied upon the ability to exchange state services for cash. This has often been taken for granted, but it is critical to understanding a second contradiction to paperwork, in addition to its duality as a disciplinary tool; the contradiction of its commodity form. Paperwork, such as stamps, licences, court summons and land grant applications, are not usually considered to be commodities. Yet, in colonial Myanmar, commodities they were. They were frequently purchased in exchange for money. Where they were legally permitted to be directly bought their price, or “exchange-value”, was often set by the state, or in the case of some state leases was realised through auctions. But their utility, or “use value”, was not so straightforward.6 These commodities in and of themselves did not materially aid any activity. As an illustration, physically a person could cut down trees from government-controlled forests without a timber licence. The papery licence was of no intrinsic use to a forester. Instead, its use value came from the state sanction that it bestowed upon the person cutting down the tree. The licencecommodity was intended to enable our would-be timber trader to fell trees without fear of state punishment, and this permission, when aggregated across forest-users, would provide this individual with greater access to this natural resource than a person without a licence. However, this permission was only meaningful if the consequences of not having state sanction were real and apparent deterrents. If licences were not policed, or counterfeit licences could be passed off as genuine, then the value of state licences was undermined. Likewise, if having a licence offered no protection from state punishment, through the oppressive behaviour of a corrupt official perhaps, then the value was also undermined. In other words, the value of paperwork was dependent upon the effectiveness of the state’s disciplinary regime. This opened up a contradiction particular to paperwork’s commodity form. Its value to the state, as well as to those

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acquiring it, was in its role in facilitating bureaucratic regulation. But this value was liable to be undercut by shortcomings in the state’s ability to enact regulatory power effectively. Those officials producing the documents were in a position to wilfully exploit this contradiction to produce documentation in exchange for cash. And for the public, the price of paperwork might not be worth paying and false documents could be commodities worth purchasing. Understanding paperwork as a peculiar type of commodity is crucial to understanding its social lives. How paper documents were produced, circulated and exchanged were informed by the contradictions of its value. This conceptualisation also enables historians to historicise the motivations and desires behind corruption. In his lively and insightful book on precisely these material and psycho-historical aspects of paperwork, The Demon of Writing, Ben Kafka points out the scarcity and thinness of Marx’s writings on the subject beyond polemics decrying bureaucracy.7 This apt observation might also be reversed, historians of paperwork are yet to confront the importance of the commodity form, the inherent contradictions to which Marx considered one of his most important “discoveries”.8 In this chapter, I address this lacuna by revisiting archival records detailing investigations into low-level bureaucratic corruption in colonial Myanmar between 1890 and 1910, in order to explore how paperwork as commodity informed corrupt practices and motivated corrupt officials. I focus on two forms of paperwork: land records and licences. Both of these forms of documentation were used to regulate the acquisition of valuable commodities. But this regulatory role also resulted in them being deployed as tools for corrupt accumulation.

Land Records In the febrile economic climate of the Myanmar delta, records pertaining to land ownership were among the most important forms of bureaucratic documentation that the colonial state produced. During the nineteenth century the delta went from mostly being a mangrove-forested backwater of the Konbaung Dynasty, whose authority emanated from the central dry lands, to being one of the world’s largest rice-producing regions, patterned by a busy riverine transport network connecting populous commercial hubs.9 This dramatic social and ecological transformation was the product of the labour of Burmese cultivators, a substantial proportion of which were migrants from the north of the country. While this

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agricultural frontier remained open, they were able to claim uncultivated land and turn it into wet-rice paddy fields. The work this entailed was punishing. Pioneer cultivators had to fell the thick forest, burn the undergrowth and dig out the dense network of roots. It could take several years for the land to be in a suitable condition to be ploughed and planted. Even then, they were in a precarious position. Flooding, wild animals and malaria were just some of the dangers that cultivators faced. This work was underpinned by heavy borrowing, and misfortune could lead to them defaulting on their loan and losing their land to their creditor. But in spite of these obstacles, the draws were significant and evident. A steady cash income from rice enabled cultivators to indulge in greater and more diverse consumption; thanks to the industrially produced foreign goods that by the 1880s were routinely imported into the colony and widely available. There was also the possibility of rapid social advancement by building on the success of the initial acquisition of land in order to acquire more, begin hiring labourers and renting to tenant-cultivators, and make greater returns.10 In this context, for pioneer cultivators land was a hard-earned commodity. For landless labourers and tenant-cultivators, it was a much sought-after commodity. As a result, land-grabbing was a noted social problem—and, as we shall see, bureaucratic corruption was a weapon utilised by land-grabbers. However, land itself was not a typical commodity. Karl Polanyi has called land a “fictive commodity”. He argued that in early modern England land ownership did not come to be shaped by market forces through incremental, organic changes, but that it required new legal frameworks and political will to render land in the form of an alienable and exchangeable commodity.11 In the abstract, this argument holds for the Myanmar Delta. The commoditisation of land required bureaucratic apparatus through which ownership could become evidenced and legally defended.12 Since land was rapidly coming under cultivation, and through debt or speculation it was beginning to accumulate in the hands of larger landowners, establishing legal evidence of landownership was essential. Disputes over the ownership of land became frequent cases in the colony’s civil courts, particularly from the 1890s. These were most often cases brought by conflicting neighbours disputing boundaries, or involving disagreements over mortgages, or resulting from contests over inheritance.13 The state itself became embroiled in these disputes as an active party, and not only as a adjudicator, but through its powers to requisition land for government works and to grant unused

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land to applicants. In addition, for the state clear ownership of land was important for the extraction of tax. Paperwork was vital in settling all of these tensions as well as for revenue collection. Nevertheless, the role of paperwork as a commodity that circulated alongside, and that could be exchanged for, land was double-edged. It made land ownership legible to the state, but it also could be used to facilitate the illicit acquisition of land. Village headmen, surveyors, revenue collectors and clerks were all in bureaucratic positions that made it possible for them to illicitly gain from the colonial state’s regulation of land. Headmen were able to use their positions to acquire land. Surveyors, revenue collectors and clerks were able to embezzle funds and fabricate documents. All of these officials could act to influence the assessment of revenue and the collection of tax. Other officials, whose roles were unconnected with the regulation of land were nevertheless able to use their influence and status as state actors to grab land. It was the very authority invested in these officials that created the opportunity for malfeasance—as was implicit from the volume of rules governing their conduct. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a series of manuals were published outlining in detail the type of paperwork to be completed; by whom, with what oversight, how frequently and where it should be stored. They were organised by the different scales of colonial governance; the village, the township and the district.14 These manuals effectively brought together the laws and standing orders that had evolved to dictate low-level bureaucratic practice for decades. Within all of this expanding bureaucracy, the position of the village headman, or thugyi, was of particular importance. Historians of the state in Myanmar have traced how the position shifted from being a linchpin, hereditary position with considerable local authority in the pre-colonial regime, to being reduced to an appointed bureaucratic functionary tasked with surveilling the villagers under British rule.15 Yet, their intermediary position, and particularly their powers of surveillance, held within them the possibility of corruption. A recurring concern for white, high-ranking British officials was that headmen were using their authority to acquire land for their family members. Or, that they were masking their own illicit acquisition of land under their family member’s names. Suspicions, however, were hard to prove. In 1906 a thugyi in Myaungmya district called Maung Po Kin was suspended while he was investigated for this form of corruption. His sister owned over 400 acres of land in his jurisdiction, his nephew 93

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acres, and his brother-in-law a further 60 acres. This being established, the Deputy Commissioner conducting the investigation could not find evidence that Maung Po Kin had used his position to help them acquire this land. But given the suspicion, and the inevitable conflicts of interest, he was transferred to a new area.16 Other headmen were caught out when they acquired land under the names of family members who were still minors. A thugyi in Pegu district was dismissed in 1893 for obtaining grants of land under the name of his son, who was only six years of age. A year later, another thugyi in the same district was also dismissed for the same misdemeanour, in this case acquiring land for his daughter and son, both of whom were still children. The practices through which these illicit land acquisitions were made were more apparent from another case in Pegu in 1898. In this instance, the thugyi, called Maung Hla Win, was dismissed for falsifying land records so that land that had been resumed by government because of the owners’ revenue arrears were made over to his own relatives. A year later, again in Pegu, the thugyi Maung Ngè was dismissed for illegally occupying the land of Maung Chein. He then entered this land in the registry under the names of his children, who were minors at the time.17 As I have argued elsewhere, there was a lenient economy of discipline at work when punishing subordinate officials for misconduct. Dismissal was a last resort, and a great deal of corruption was tolerated.18 These headmen in Pegu district were likely dismissed because of the strength of the evidence against them. Many more who were engaged in similar practices would have avoided this fate. Maung Ngè did not only engage in land-grabbing and falsify the registry, he also defrauded the government by assessing this land at fallow rates for three years.19 His case illustrates a second way that paperwork could be used for corrupt ends with regard to land. It was not only used to hide illicit ownership; it could also be used to misrepresent its value. Like Maung Ngè, Maung Pan Pyu Aung, a thugyi in Kyaukpyu district, was dismissed in 1904 for both acquiring lands under his children’s names and for under-assessing the revenue due from it, this time through falsely recording the measurements of the plots. Three years later, another thugyi in the same district, Maung Than Lôn, was dismissed for favouring a friend in a similar fashion to this. For ten years he had deliberately not assessed over 300 acres of land belonging to one Maung San Dun.20 Clerks and revenue surveyors were dismissed for similar acts, although often with the implication that this was done in exchange for an illegal fee. For instance, in 1908 a township clerk called Maung Po

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Tha was dismissed for charging and receiving a fee for remissions in land revenue.21 In 1903 another clerk was dismissed for helping his brother, a revenue surveyor, extract illegal fees.22 More often than misrepresenting the value of land for revenue collection, officials were disciplined for recording inaccurate assessments of land grants. Identifying wilful malfeasance was difficult in these cases. In 1900, Maung Gale, a township officer in the Irrawaddy Division was investigated for certifying applications for land grants that were of a size that put them beyond his powers to certify. Furthermore, it was claimed that he was doing so without visiting the plots. It turned out that some of these grants were for land that was larger than the applications had indicated. He was also accused of producing false documents in support of these applications. Further investigations found that the standing orders limiting the size of land that township officers could grant were being widely flaunted across the district, due to widespread ignorance of their existence. Maung Gale was not thought to have been corrupt in his actions, but neglectful. The inconsistencies in his paperwork were not attributed to a deliberate attempt to defraud the state, but to a lack of diligence and subsequent clumsy attempts to correct errors.23 Distinguishing corruption from incompetence was a challenge for investigating officials, who were likely to give the benefit of the doubt to the accused official.24 These challenges notwithstanding, at least five clerks were dismissed in similar cases during the period under study; one for falsifying signatures on applications, another for charging illegal fees for applications.25 Many of these forms of misconduct were exposed in the 1902 misconduct investigation into Maung Pyo, a forest ranger employed in Myaungmya district. While his job did not give him direct access to paperwork pertaining to land, he was still able to effectively acquire documentation that hid his illicit actions. He disregarded orders requiring him to disclose his possession of land. He then concealed and strengthened his possession of this land by abetting the issue of land grants to bogus applicants. This land was then recorded in the name of his mother. It was only as a result of his disputes with his neighbours, whose land he trespassed upon and attempted to claim ownership over through false titles, that his connivance with bureaucratic corruption was uncovered. He was convicted of criminal trespass and dismissed from government service.26 The records detailing dismissals provide some hints at the types of interactions that enabled land-grabbing officials like Maung Pyo to acquire land grants, even though government employees were prohibited

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from receiving them. In 1906, a clerk in Toungoo district was dismissed for taking money in exchange for land grants, a practice compounded by the fact that he was not permitted to issue grants in any case. Similarly, in 1903 a clerk in the office of the Pyapôn township officer was dismissed for accepting money from headmen, and the general public, for grants of uncultivated land. In 1897 two different headmen employed in the Kyaukpyu district were dismissed for granting land to government servants. In other dismissal cases subordinate officials used their access to paperwork to engage in land-speculation. In 1896 a township officer’s clerk called Maung Po Thein in the Hathawaddy district was dismissed for buying and selling land, and for fabricating false evidence to aid this. He was reported as having made “marks to represent signatures of persons [on] applications for land”. A year later a thugyi in Akyab district, Maung Thu Taw U, was dismissed for buying land from a clerk and selling it on as grazing land to local villagers.27 This in spite of the rules governing grazing grounds that stipulated that they were for district commissioners to allocate, and for headmen to monitor the boundary marks.28 Land grants were being allocated by (and to) state officials for personal gain, and government records were being falsified to enable this. The very bureaucratic processes intended to provide security of landownership were frequently used by subordinate officials to illicitly acquire or speculate in land. In other related cases, officials demanded illegal fees in exchange for land grants or for reductions in land revenue taxes. The production of paperwork was crucial in most of these practices. In cases of officials charging fees for the discharge of their duties, or as inducement to act corruptly, documents were commodities being exchanged directly for cash. For most cases, however, paperwork was bound-up with illicit transactions of that “fictive commodity”, land. In these cases, falsified government records—such as survey reports, land grant applications and land registries—were purporting to be evidence that a particular person was the rightful owner of the land. These records represented or signified land in its commodity form, since the land itself could not provide evidence of its ownership. The prevalence of landgrabbing and criminal trespass made even possession a weak basis for proving ownership. It was the ability of government records to act as the material evidence of exchanges of land as a commodity that formed the central tension between paperwork’s utility and corruptibility. The exchange-value of the land that documents purported to represent, and the costs of the paperwork—both materially as well as in terms of the

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disciplinary risks of engaging in its falsification—were at odds with one another. Officials with access to these documents could treat their paperwork as the production of a special kind of commodity, with the intention of realising greater value from them.

Licences The issuing of licences was a device commonly used by imperial bureaucrats to regulate society. In colonial Myanmar by the 1890s licences were issued for guns, hunting certain animals, fishing with certain types of net, felling timber in government forests, selling opium, establishing slaughterhouses, producing salt, collecting forest honey, holding a pwè (theatrical performance) and a range of other activities. And subordinate officials were dismissed for misconduct connected to licences in each of the areas of state regulation named above.29 As a form of state documentation, licences took on a more obvious, albeit quite specific, commodity form in comparison to the paperwork associated with landownership. Licences had a cash price that was exchanged for sanction to participate in particular activities. The regulatory purposes for each different licence were diverse. For example, timber licences—which were nuanced by tree species—were in place to conserve and manage forests, according to the principles of scientific imperial forestry. These regulations favoured the access of commercially powerful imperial timber firms over local uses of forests, particularly that of itinerant communities subsisting on the produce of shifting cultivation.30 Licences to sell opium, however, were intended to limit the sale and consumption of the drug according to ethnicity. In colonial discourses of racial difference in Myanmar, the Burmese were represented as being weak-willed, gullible and liable to addiction. In contrast, Chinese populations in the colony were considered wily, guileful and likely to take advantage of their Burmese neighbours. The licences were designed to supply the demands of local Chinese populations while paternalistically protecting the Burmese.31 Yet, in spite of the quite specific bureaucratic intentions behind the issuing of licences, as commodities purchased for cash, in their social lives they represented universally exchangeable value. As I noted in the introduction, the value of a licence was dependent on the effectiveness of the bureaucratic processes that they were embedded in. However, the issuing of licences could be used to undermine these

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very processes by hiding illegal activities. Cases of illegal timber extraction provide good examples of how this occurred. In 1898, Maung Po Thet, a forest ranger who worked alongside the land-grabbing Maung Pyo discussed in the previous section, was investigated on two-related charges. The first was that he connived in the illicit conversion of timber— the process through which a log was turned into planks—without royalty payments being made. The second was that he conspired to allow the illegal removal of canes from Kazaung forest without a licence. On both charges the investigating officer found significant cause for suspicion from a study of the extant paperwork and his consideration of Maung Po Thet’s explanations. On the first charge, it appeared that Maung Po Thet did nothing to check on operations to convert timber. He did not leave his district offices to inspect the forests, and he did not send his subordinates to do this either. In the absence of this oversight, timber was converted without a licence and without the government collecting the royalties. The investigation found that this was “culpable negligence” but could find no evidence to prove that his absences and failure to issue the necessary paperwork had been contrived to collude with this illicit timber conversion, although the implication was strong. The second charge, of facilitating the illegal extract of canes, was more suspicious still. In this case Maung Po Thet had retrospectively granted a licence to people who had already cut cane from the forest without a licence permitting them to do so. It was suspected that this was done to embezzle the royalties, which had been obtained prior to the licence being issued. The investigation fell short of upholding the charge of connivance but did hold that “deliberate and seriously culpable irregularity” was evident in his behaviour. The dates, signatures and brief note on the licence were what gave Maung Po Thet away in this case, as these indicated that the canes had already been cut when he inspected them and issued the licence. But this evidence did not show his motivations for doing so, or prove a link between himself and those doing the illegal cutting.32 In his case both the absence of paperwork and its irregular use served to hide illegal forest work, at least until accusations of bribery and extortion were levelled against Maung Po Thet leading to an investigation. Maung Po Thet was not dismissed for his failings. He was demoted and transferred. Gathering evidence of outright corruption with regard to timber licences was a reoccurring challenge for investigating officials. The case of Maung Mo revealed the strategies taken by forest rangers to

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avoid punishment. In 1902 he was transferred after the Conservator of Forests found a number of irregularities in his practices. It appeared that companies were sharing the licences that he had been issuing. A “thit (wood) gang” was established with a licence, and then individual timber traders operated under this licence, felling the trees directly from the forest without any further state oversight. His family-ties were suspected as motivating his lax behaviour. He lived with his mother-in-law who was a creditor for a number of timber traders operating in the area.33 Again, culpability but not active connivance was deemed to be evident. The timber licence was issued but timber traders used it collectively in an irregular manner, and Maung Mo had done nothing to stop this. This was not the end of the accusations against Maung Mo. Following his transfer, a number of anonymous petitions continued to arrive at the offices of his superior officers claiming that he was extracting bribes in exchange for licences and that he overlooked the illegal extraction of timber without a licence. The examples of the latter provided in these petitions were contradicted by the paperwork and testimonies of those involved, and the petitions were ultimately dismissed. However, Maung Mo’s manner of defending himself was revealing. He claimed that his success in uncovering illicit timber extraction had gained him enemies and supported this with statements from timber traders who testified that those harbouring ill-will towards Maung Mo had been rounding them up and pressing them for evidence that could be used against him. Those statements had been taken by Maung Mo himself.34 As I have argued elsewhere, accusations of corruption were enmeshed in webs of local intrigue and enmity that are impossible to unpick from the extant records.35 This was also a problem for contemporaries. British officials overseeing his work were aware that Maung Mo had considerable local influence. Maung Mo’s ability to induce local timber traders to provide testimony on his behalf reinforced this. He also had a “good” record of uncovering cases, as he had claimed. The suspicion that he was held under by high-ranking officials, regardless of his protestations, emanated from the inherent power that Forest Rangers had in producing or overlooking evidence of illegal timber extraction. They could refuse to issue licences, or demand brides in exchange for them, thereby manufacturing cases of illegal extraction. Or they could retrospectively issue licences, or fabricate them, in order to hide illegal extraction. As a result, personal power and official authority were entangled, and could be mutually reinforcing through misconduct.

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Irrespective of the particularities of Maung Po Thet and Maung Mo’s actions, the wider practices that the cases elucidate were reproduced across the colony. This was apparent from the details of those officials annually listed as having been dismissed from government service. In Tenasserim in 1886, a forest guard was dismissed for failing to report a case in which forty-five logs were cut without a licence. Three years later in Pegu district a clerk was dismissed for forging the Conservator of Forests’ signature on a licence form. In 1898, back in Tenasserim, a forester was dismissed for fraudulently under-recording quantities of timber, and through this concealing timber had been extracted and converted without royalties being paid. In 1899 a deputy forest ranger was dismissed for aiding and abetting the illegal conversion of teak. In 1901, a deputy ranger was dismissed for allowing “either by gross carelessness or active connivances” the extraction and conversion of teak without a licence. A year later another deputy ranger was dismissed for illegally selling reserved trees and appropriating the proceeds. The dismissal in this case was rather meaningless, as the culprit had already absconded with his ill-begotten gains. And that same year a clerk in Mandalay’s forest office was dismissed for demanding bribes and making fraudulent entries on licences. In addition, dozens of forest officials were dismissed following convictions for criminal breach of trust, extortion and abetting criminality, although the details of the cases were not provided.36 These instances—where timber extracted and converted without licences was wilfully overlooked by officials, or where licences were obtained from officials who demanded additional illegal payments, or where paperwork was forged by officials to disguise illegal extraction and conversion—need to be understood as the result of the licence as a special type of commodity. The price of a licence was only worth paying if the disciplinary network enforcing the restrictions and regulations the licence purported to police was reliable. If the officials tasked with issuing licences and policing their usage could be induced to ignore illicit extractions, then the licence was not worth purchasing. For officials, on the other hand, the tension between the price of the licence and its questionable utility in guaranteeing the bearer security from state punishment created the opportunity for monetary gain. As the purveyors of a commodity that could be produced—fraudulently or otherwise—or withheld, or whose absence could be overlooked, in exchange for cash, forest officials and clerks could extract a surplus from the licence.

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The cases involving timber licences were similar to those involving opium licences in that the tension in the value of the licence enabled officials to make personal gains out their role. Cases from the Irrawaddy Division give an indication of this. In 1901 a petition addressed by the residents of Nyaunggyaung village in Danubyu township claimed that among a number of misdemeanours allegedly committed by their headman, Maung Yau, he allowed three individuals to sell opium when they were not licence-holders, in exchange for hush-money.37 That same year a notorious police inspector working in the delta called Pakiri was convicted of planting opium on some Chinese men to frame them for selling the drug without a licence, in an attempt extort them.38 In 1904 a heavily indebted excise officer called Maung Po Hla, working in Wakema district in the delta, attempted to use his authority in issuing and policing opium licences to force a licensee to give him a loan, resulting in his transfer to a new district.39 In 1905 a large drug bust a short distance away in Henzada district implicated another excise officer in colluding with extensive opium smuggling, resulting in his demotion.40 Senior officials’ concerns about excise officers in Irrawaddy Division were so acute that by 1906 one deputy commissioner opined that there were no trustworthy excise officers to replace the one that he recently had to suspend for misconduct.41 The list of dismissals reveals further cases. In 1898 an opium clerk was dismissed for making false entries of sales in the register and then possessing more opium himself than was recorded. The following year another opium clerk was dismissed for the similar offences of selling opium and making false entries in the registry of sales. That same year an excise sergeant in Kyaukpyu district was dismissed for fabricating a case of an illicit sale of opium. In 1895 in Thatôn district another excise sergeant was dismissed for falsifying reports. And another was dismissed after being convicted of extortion in 1902. In 1891 an excise officer was dismissed for fraud through falsifying entries in an opium pass. Beyond excise officials, police officers were also dismissed for abusing opium licencing laws.42 While their purpose was distinct from timber licences, the nature of the forms of corruption that were recorded was comparable. The value of a licence, which was supposed to be congruent with its value in permitting the holder to sell opium legally, was in practice contingent on the actions of officials who were empowered to both produce and police this paperwork. Like forest officials, excise officials were able to exploit this tension to literally profit from their bureaucratic niche.

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Further cases could be explored to illustrate how similar practices attended to other areas of colonial licencing schemes—indeed, licences for the use of certain fishing nets appear to have been used extensively for corruption. However, this brief discussion of timber licences and opium licences suffices to outline the central tension of paperwork as commodity. There was always a potential for the use value of the licence-commodity, its ability to endow the bearer with state sanction, to be undermined by the actions of the subordinate officials. This meant that the exchange-value of the licence-commodity, its price, was compromised. At the same time, its exchange-value informed misconduct, setting a monetary amount against which the price of hush-money, bribes and forgeries could be calculated. The social lives of licences were animated by the contradictions inherent to their commodity form.

Conclusion This chapter opened by arguing that a significant part of the historical context for corruption in colonial contexts has been largely overlooked by historians: the expansion and entrenchment of capitalism. I went on to suggest that this gap has meant that the motivations for corruption have been assumed, taken for granted and, resultantly, reified. By conceptualising paperwork as a peculiar form of commodity, both of these issues can begin to be addressed. Through a study of the forms of corruption attendant to land records and licences in colonial Myanmar around 1900, the chapter has been able to uncover the importance of paperwork as a commodity that mediated and regulated access to other valuable commodities; specifically, land, timber and opium. It has also been able to draw out the profit-motive cultivated by the tension within the commodity form between its “exchange-value” and its “use value”. As subordinate officials were often in a position to be able to manipulate the utility of government documents through acts of misconduct, they were also in a position to profit from this by accepting cash in exchange for (not) doing the paperwork, or for doing it duplicitously or fraudulently. The import of this analysis should not be overstated. Monetary gain was not the sole motivator for acts of corruption. This would be a reductive and intellectually regressive claim. For instance, my previous work has shown that sexual gratification and the desire to perform a violently assertive mode of masculinity was a driver for misconduct around cases of sexual and gendered violence.43 The profit motive does not

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and cannot sufficiently explain these malpractices. Rather than treating the possibilities for corruption inherent in the paperwork-commodity as primary or universal drivers, I would argue that this is instead a route into historicising the link between capitalism and corruption. The particular configurations of capitalism as it formed in colonial Myanmar were vital to the forms of corruption explored above. The booming frontier economy of the delta gave new meaning and value to land, and the imperial legal regime sought to buttress its status as an alienable and exchangeable commodity. Corruption was immanent to these processes. Likewise, the state’s attempts to issue licences in order to regulate access to forests as well as to restrict the sale of opium always held within them the possibility of corruption. In considering the place of subordinate officials as agents within these histories, recent ethnographic work on land-grabbing in contemporary Myanmar provides us with a useful concept; that of “accumulation from below”.44 Holding office in the colonial bureaucracy provided the opportunity for some colonised people, without much in the way of capital, to begin to accumulate wealth beyond their salary. These everyday strategies for small-scale accumulation need to be placed in the wider context of the colony being opened up and re-organised for the speculations of imperial capital operating out of London, and the growing influence of Indian capital in the form of agricultural creditors.45 Finally, I would tentatively suggest that the insights in this chapter point towards the benefits of the history of corruption being more closely aligned to the history of capitalism. This is a diverse field, although it remains rather north American focussed despite the global ambitions of some authors.46 As a result, it is a field without a clear overarching set of parameters and goals.47 Nevertheless, as a body of work the particular attention paid to denaturalising and historicising capitalism in the past has been usefully identified as a common approach. By tracing shifts in the history of corruption in colonial contexts, and particularly by being attentive to how paperwork becomes commodified under imperialism, studies of corruption can make a valuable contribution to this dynamic area of study. Such an engagement would strengthen the global ambit of historical studies of corruption and provide linkages, both intellectual and empirical, between works set in very different colonial contexts.

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Notes 1. C. A Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2, no. 1 (2002): 87–109; Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Warwick Anderson, “The Case of the Archive,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 3 (2013): 532–547. 2. Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily Lynn Osborn, and Richard L Roberts, eds., Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Bhavani Raman, “The Duplicity of Paper: Counterfeit, Discretion, and Bureaucratic Authority in Early Colonial Madras,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 2 (2012): 229–250; Jonathan Saha, “Devious Documents: Corruption and Paperwork in Colonial Burma, c.1900,” in Subverting Empire: Deviance and Disorder in the British Colonial World, ed. Will Jackson and Emily Manktelow (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 167–84. 3. Ann Laura Stoler, “‘In Cold Blood’: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives,” Representations, no. 37 (1992): 151–189; Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance.” 4. Steven Pierce, “Looking Like a State: Colonialism and the Discourse of Corruption in Northern Nigeria,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 04 (2006): 887–914; William Gould, Bureaucracy, Community and Influence in India: Society and the State, 1930s–1960s, 1st ed. (Routledge, 2010); William Gould, Taylor C. Sherman, and Sarah Ansari, “The Flux of the Matter: Loyalty, Corruption and the “Everyday State” in the Post-Partition Government Services of India and Pakistan,” Past & Present, no. 219 (2013): 237–279; Steven Pierce, Moral Economies of Corruption (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 5. Jonathan Saha, Law, Disorder, and the Colonial State: Corruption in Burma c.1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 6. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977). 7. Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York: MIT Press, 2012). 8. Mario Tronti, Workers and Capital, trans. David Broder (London and New York: Verso, 2019). 9. Cheng Siok-Hwa, The Rice Industry of Burma, 1852–1940 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1968); Michael Adas, The Burma

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11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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Delta: Economic Development and Social Change on an Asian Rice Frontier, 1852–1941 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974); Peter A. Coclanis, “Southeast Asia’s Incorporation into the World Rice Market: A Revisionist View,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 24, no. 2 (1993): 251–267. Ian Brown, A Colonial Economy in Crisis: Burma’s Rice Delta and the World Depression of the 1930s, RoutledgeCurzon Studies in the Modern History of Asia 28 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 10–13. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002). In framing this point I have been heavily influenced by the arguments in Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). Printed Judgements of the Court of the Judicial Commissioner, Lower Burma, and the Special Court, for the Period Extending from 1893–1900, 2nd ed. (Rangoon: Office of the superintendent of government printing, Burma, 1905). The Burma District Office Manual, 3rd ed. (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma, 1915); The Burma Subdivisional and Township Office Manual, 3rd ed. (Rangoon: Superintendent government printing, Burma, 1910); The Burma Village Manual (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing and Stationery, Burma, 1926). John Frank Cady, A History of Modern Burma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958); Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Robert H. Taylor, The State in Myanmar, New ed (London: C. Hurst, 2008). National Archives of Myanmar, Yangon, hereafter NAM, 1/15 (E), 7287, 1906 File No. 7M-16: August 3, 1906; December 10, 1906. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7350, 1908 File No. 7M-10. Saha, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7350, 1908 File No. 7M-10. Ibid. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7377, 1909 File No. 7M-10. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7350, 1908 File No. 7M-10. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7023, 1900 File No. 7M-11: February 14, 1900; May 24, 1900. Saha, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7350, 1908 File No. 7M-10. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7077, 1902 File No. 7M-3: October 28, 1902. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7350, 1908 File No. 7M-10. The Lower Burma Headman’s Manual, 4th ed. (Rangoon: Office of the superintendent, government printing, Burma, 1910), 23–24.

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29. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7350, 1908 File No. 7M-10; NAM, 1/15 (E), 7377, 1909 File No. 7M-10. 30. Raymond L Bryant, The Political Ecology of Forestry in Burma, 1824– 1994 (London: Hurst, 1997); Raymond L Bryant, “Romancing Colonial Forestry: The Discourse of “Forestry as Progress” in British Burma,” The Geographical Journal 162, no. 2 (1996): 169–178; Raymond L Bryant, “Shifting the Cultivator: The Politics of Teak Regeneration in Colonial Burma,” Modern Asian Studies 28, no. 2 (1994): 225–250; Raymond L Bryant, “Fighting over the Forests: Political Reform, Peasant Resistance and the Transformation of Forest Management in Late Colonial Burma,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 32, no. 2 (1994): 244–260. 31. Ashley Wright, “Opium in British Burma, 1826–1881,” Contemporary Drug Problems 35 (2008): 611–646; Jonathan Saha, “Colonization, Criminalization and Complicity: Policing Gambling in Burma c 1880– 1920,” South East Asia Research 21, no. 4 (2013): 655–672; Ashley Wright, Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia: Regulating Consumption in British Burma (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 32. NAM, 1/15 (E), 6981, 1898 File No. 7M-10: September 9, 1898. 33. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7084, 1902 File No. 7M-12: April 21, 1902; June 1, 1902. 34. Ibid., November 28, 1902; December 20, 1902. 35. Jonathan Saha, “A Mockery of Justice? Colonial Law, the Everyday State and Village Politics in the Burma Delta c.1900,” Past & Present, no. 217 (2012): 187–212; Saha, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State, 72– 96; Saha, “Devious Documents: Corruption and Paperwork in Colonial Burma, c.1900.” 36. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7350, 1908 File No. 7M-10. 37. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7062, 1901 File No. 7M-12. 38. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7063, 1901 File No. 7M-22: November 26, 1901. For a full account of Pakiri’s career see, Saha, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State, 47–71. 39. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7177, 1904 File No. 7M-49: September 28, 1904. 40. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7208, 1905 File No. 7M-18: October 6, 1905. 41. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7310, 1907 File No. 7M-1: November 9, 1906. 42. NAM, 1/15 (E), 7350, 1908 File No. 7M-10. 43. Jonathan Saha, “The Male State: Colonialism, Corruption and Rape Investigations in the Irrawaddy Delta c.1900,” Indian Economic Social History Review 47, no. 3 (2010): 343–376. 44. Kevin M. Woods, “Smaller-Scale Land Grabs and Accumulation from below: Violence, Coercion and Consent in Spatially Uneven Agrarian Change in Shan State, Myanmar,” World Development 127 (2020): 1–16.

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45. Adas, The Burma Delta; Willem van Schendel, “Origins of the Burma Rice Boom, 1850–1880,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 17, no. 4 (1987): 456–472; Anthony Webster, “Business and Empire: A Reassessment of the British Conquest of Burma in 1885,” The Historical Journal 43, no. 4 (2000): 1003–1025; Brown, A Colonial Economy in Crisis. 46. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, Reprint edition (New York, NY: Penguin Random House USA, 2015); Sven Beckert, “American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950,” The American Historical Review 122, no. 4 (2017): 1137–1170; For some recent interventions in Asian history, see: Debjani Bhattacharyya, “Provincializing the History of Speculation from Colonial South Asia,” History Compass 17, no. 1 (2019), 1–11; Andrew B. Liu, “Production, Circulation, and Accumulation: The Historiographies of Capitalism in China and South Asia,” The Journal of Asian Studies 78, no. 4 (2019): 767–788. 47. Sven Beckert et al., “Interchange: The History of Capitalism,” Journal of American History 101, no. 2 (2014): 503–536.

References Adas, Michael. The Burma Delta: Economic Development and Social Change on an Asian Rice Frontier, 1852–1941. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974. Anderson, Clare. Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Anderson, Warwick. “The Case of the Archive.” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 3 (2013): 532–547. Bayly, C. A. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Beckert, Sven. “American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950.” The American Historical Review 122, no. 4 (2017): 1137–1170. Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Reprint edition. New York, NY: Penguin Random House USA, 2015. Beckert, Sven, Angus Burgin, Peter James Hudson, Louis Hyman, Naomi Lamoreaux, Scott Marler, Stephen Mihm, Julia Ott, Philip Scranton, and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer. “Interchange: The History of Capitalism.” Journal of American History 101, no. 2 (2014): 503–536. Bhattacharyya, Debjani. “Provincializing the History of Speculation from Colonial South Asia.” History Compass 17, no. 1 (2019), 1–11.

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Birla, Ritu. Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Brown, Ian. A Colonial Economy in Crisis: Burma’s Rice Delta and the World Depression of the 1930s. Routledge Curzon Studies in the Modern History of Asia 28. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005. Bryant, Raymond L. “Fighting over the Forests: Political Reform, Peasant Resistance and the Transformation of Forest Management in Late Colonial Burma.” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 32, no. 2 (1994): 244–260. Bryant, Raymond L. “Romancing Colonial Forestry: The Discourse of ‘Forestry as Progress’ in British Burma.” The Geographical Journal 162, no. 2 (1996): 169–178. Bryant, Raymond L. “Shifting the Cultivator: The Politics of Teak Regeneration in Colonial Burma.” Modern Asian Studies 28, no. 2 (1994): 225–50. Bryant, Raymond L. The Political Ecology of Forestry in Burma, 1824–1994. London: Hurst, 1997. Cady, John Frank. A History of Modern Burma. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1958. Coclanis, Peter A. “Southeast Asia’s Incorporation into the World Rice Market: A Revisionist View.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 24, no. 2 (1993): 251–67. Gould, William. Bureaucracy, Community and Influence in India: Society and the State, 1930s–1960s. 1st ed. Routledge, 2010. Gould, William, Taylor C. Sherman, and Sarah Ansari. “The Flux of the Matter: Loyalty, Corruption and the ‘Everyday State’ in the Post-Partition Government Services of India and Pakistan’. Past & Present, no. 219 (2013): 237–279. Kafka, Ben. The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork. New York: MIT Press, 2012. Lawrance, Benjamin N, Emily Lynn Osborn, and Richard L Roberts, eds. Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa. Madison, Wisc: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Liu, Andrew B. “Production, Circulation, and Accumulation: The Historiographies of Capitalism in China and South Asia.” The Journal of Asian Studies 78, no. 4 (2019): 767–788. Marx, Karl. Capital. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Myint-U, Thant. The Making of Modern Burma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ogborn, Miles. Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

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Pierce, Steven. “Looking Like a State: Colonialism and the Discourse of Corruption in Northern Nigeria.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 4 (2006): 887–914. Pierce, Steven. Moral Economies of Corruption. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. 2nd edition. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002. Printed Judgements of the Court of the Judicial Commissioner, Lower Burma, and the Special Court, for the Period Extending from 1893–1900. 2nd ed. Rangoon: Office of the superintendent of government printing, Burma, 1905. Raman, Bhavani. “The Duplicity of Paper: Counterfeit, Discretion, and Bureaucratic Authority in Early Colonial Madras.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 2 (2012): 229–250. Saha, Jonathan. “A Mockery of Justice? Colonial Law, the Everyday State and Village Politics in the Burma Delta c.1900.” Past & Present, no. 217 (2012): 187–212. Saha, Jonathan. “Colonization, Criminalization and Complicity: Policing Gambling in Burma c 1880–1920.” South East Asia Research 21, no. 4 (2013): 655–672. Saha, Jonathan. “Devious Documents: Corruption and Paperwork in Colonial Burma, c.1900.” In Subverting Empire: Deviance and Disorder in the British Colonial World, edited by Will Jackson and Emily Manktelow, 167–84. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Saha, Jonathan. Law, Disorder, and the Colonial State: Corruption in Burma c.1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Saha, Jonathan. “The Male State: Colonialism, Corruption and Rape Investigations in the Irrawaddy Delta c.1900.” Indian Economic Social History Review 47, no. 3 (2010): 343–376. Schendel, Willem Van. “Origins of the Burma Rice Boom, 1850–1880.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 17, no. 4 (1987): 456–472. Siok-Hwa, Cheng. The Rice Industry of Burma, 1852–1940. Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1968. Stoler, Ann Laura. “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance.” Archival Science 2, no. 1 (2002): 87–109. Stoler, Ann Laura. ‘“In Cold Blood”: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives’. Representations, no. 37 (1992): 151–189. Stoler, Ann Laura.Opium and Empire in Southeast Asia: Regulating Consumption in British Burma. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Stoler, Ann Laura. “Opium in British Burma, 1826–1881.” Contemporary Drug Problems 35 (2008): 611–646. Taylor, Robert H. The State in Myanmar. New ed. London: C. Hurst, 2008.

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The Burma District Office Manual. 3rd ed. Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma, 1915. The Burma Subdivisional and Township Office Manual. 3rd ed. Rangoon: Superintendent Government printing, Burma, 1910. The Burma Village Manual. Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing and Stationery, Burma, 1926. The Lower Burma Headman’s Manual. 4th ed. Rangoon: Office of the superintendent, government printing, Burma, 1910. Tronti, Mario. Workers and Capital. Translated by David Broder. London; New York: Verso, 2019. Webster, Anthony. “Business and Empire: A Reassessment of the British Conquest of Burma in 1885.” The Historical Journal 43, no. 4 (2000): 1003–1025. Woods, Kevin M. “Smaller-Scale Land Grabs and Accumulation from below: Violence, Coercion and Consent in Spatially Uneven Agrarian Change in Shan State, Myanmar.” World Development 127 (2020): 1–16.

CHAPTER 12

The Entrenchment of Corruption in a Colonial Context: The Case of the Philippines, c. 1900 Xavier Huetz de Lemps

Introduction From the time of Philippine independence, corruption1 has been a key aspect of the archipelago’s political life. It was the origin of the fall of two presidents, Ferdinand Marcos (1986) and Joseph Estrada (2001), while the presidential terms of others (without exception) have been marked by serious politico-financial scandals and accusations, both founded and not, of embezzlement at the highest levels of the state. Aside from these notable scandals, small-time corruption of police officers, teachers, bureau of immigration civil servants, tax employees or customs officers is a daily reality which ends up going unnoticed, and becoming a simple fact of life.2 The existence of very high levels of public corruption and the considerable harm of these behaviours on the development of the Philippines are, today, widely established facts. This is the case even if

X. Huetz de Lemps (B) Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Kroeze et al. (eds.), Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era, Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9_12

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the responsibility of any given civil servant or politician, the actual level of corruption or the amount of embezzled money are the subject of inevitable debates. In a country where the liberty of expression and the press really do exist, this phenomenon is described, analysed, denounced and instrumentalised in order to discredit rivals or political enemies on an almost daily basis. The urgency with which efficient measures for combating corruption is pointed out, day after day, by journalists of every political background.3 In sum, the Republic of the Philippines has defended, with skill, the place it has occupied for years among the most corrupt states of the world, and presents a case of a “meta-system”,4 a “cancer” at an advanced state.5 The forms of corruption, the economic and political consequences it engenders and the methods contemplated for eradicating it are not especially Philippine. Additionally, since the time of the Asian economic crisis of 1997 up to today, reflections on the how-and-why of corruption have developed considerably in the Asia-Pacific zone. These comparative analyses, these general interpretations, these global strategies for combating corruption are essential for taking stock of the phenomenon. They are even sometimes useful for this combat. Nevertheless, as with theoretical approaches from the 1960s and 1970s that suggested that corruption “greased” the seized gears of bureaucracy, they inevitably gave a place of privilege to formal analogies—otherwise indisputable—to the detriment of the particular case of each of the infected countries. In contrast, for a long time some analysts have highlighted that the lines between legal and illegal behaviour change with time and are intimately tied to their cultural context. In the case of the Philippines, excellent anthropological and sociological research has shown that the global functioning of society is structured by a small number of values which transcend social, ethnic and religious barriers. The notion of individual existence, the relationships between individuals, as well as the relationship between citizens and state cannot be disassociated from family and interpersonal ties, or the necessary reciprocity in social exchanges that result from the principle of debts of gratitude or honour (utang na loob). These pre-capitalist forms of social exchange were and will continue to be, to a certain extent, powerful counterweights against a clear distinction between the public and private spheres, loyalty to individuals being favoured over loyalty to institutions.6 This anthropological data, entirely internalised by individuals, constituted—and to a degree still constitutes—a favourable environment for phenomena which,

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in the West, have been progressively considered pathological (e.g. nepotism, clientelism, clanism and corruption). As pointed out by Ronald Kroeze in his chapter, the colonial context after 1800 became in essence a major field of confrontation between increasingly diverging norms and values. Taking into account this ethos has considerably renewed the social sciences, but it also has its limits.7 Aside from sometimes treating culture as a fixed and essentialised pattern, cultural interpretations can lead to certain deviations such as a denial of even the existence of corruption, arguing that the phenomenon is the result of imposing imperialist norms issued from the West. Western notions of illegality would then be, in Philippine culture, legitimate modes of exchange between administrators and citizens, or even a moral obligation. By limiting the analysis to such a framework, corruption is made banal, even legitimate, and any political movement that seeks to eradicate it is predestined to failure, except in the case of a hypothetical “cultural revolution”. Historians, haunted by the fear of anachronism, reckless filiation and hasty generalisations are uncomfortable faced with “persistences”8 such as corruption. Yet, their role cannot be limited to anecdotal studies of scandals from the past or reductive filiations between the colonial period and the post-colonial contemporary states.9 With prudence, they can propose explanatory frameworks. The hypothesis defended here is that the large scale of current rates of public corruption in the Philippines is mostly the result of a historic process of state building on the one hand, and on the other a concomitant evolution of the political-administrative culture of the Philippines. In these two domains, the endless colonial domination, Spanish from 1565 to 1898 and then United States from 1898 to 1941, constituted a determining experience since it corresponded to a progressive installation of the foundations both defective of a bureaucratic state for the first period, and of a Western-style democracy for the second. We summarise below the practices and representations of corruption at the time of the end of the economic system of the Manila Galleons (1815). Subsequently, we show that the extension of the Spanish colonial administration’s spheres of competence and the changes that came along during the nineteenth century—in the recruiting of colonial personnel as well as their Philippine intermediaries—provoked a profound evolution in forms of corruption. This also led to the generalisation and normalisation of corrupt practices while, at the same time, juridical treatment of corruption and the theoretically enacted punishments were clarified. The American “recolonialisation” was marked by two divergent evolutions.

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On one hand, the introduction of new recruiting rules and surveillance of public employees seems to have significantly reduced administrative corruption. However, in the fertile ground of local political practices inherited from the Spanish colonial period, corruption infected the new political institutions gradually entrusted to elected Filipinos. The Philippine case shows that if the colonial situation was, by the very nature of the power dynamics that it imposed, conducive to the corruption of the colonisers as much as the colonised, the forms of corruption, the preferential spheres of its entrenchment as well as the degree of social tolerance cannot be understood without a rigorous contextualisation. Such a context should take into account, at any given time, the entirety of local actors (e.g. honest and corrupt colonial employees, victimised and complicit colonial subjects, settlers and foreigners of the private sector, missionaries, etc.), in addition to the imperial logic in which the specific trajectory of a colony was fitted (i.e. the imperial rhetoric and project prevailing at that time, the degree of knowledge and representations of corruption overseas as well as in the metropolis, the degree to which colonies were assimilated in terms of law and the management of public personnel, etc.). In sum, corruption in nineteenth century Philippines must be approached on three different scales. Firstly, the local setting, because the archipelago had specific characteristics due to culture and history. Secondly, the imperial context because the degree of corruption in the Philippines was comparable with other Spanish colonies, more specifically Cuba,10 and because a substantial part of the causes of the corruption in the Philippines—or in Cuba—were rooted in the political system prevailing in Spain. Thirdly, the European global dominance legitimised both corrupted behaviours and anti-corruptions policies.

The Spanish Colonial Legacy To make things clearer, a distinction can be made between two periods. The first one—covering the mid-eighteenth century to the midnineteenth century—is what we could call a “Spanish imperial meridian” coinciding with the disappearance of traditional niches of corruption and the emergence of new ones. The second one, from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Spanish domination (in 1898) corresponds to a short outburst of corruption at all levels.

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For the first two centuries of Spanish domination, the Manila Galleon system was the main source of illegal—although widely tolerated—enrichment to the limited number of Crown employees exiled to the most distant territory from the metropolis. The king’s representatives tasked with ensuring the rules were respected, the governor general himself, actively participated in this massive contraband.11 After the Seven Years’ War and the capture of Manila by the East India Company, the Bourbons introduced wide-scale reforms directed to develop the own resources of the Philippines, liberalise the colonial commerce with Spanish America, Asia and Europe and, to a lesser extent, strengthen the powers of the colonial administration. As far as illicit enrichment is concerned, this policy had the following implications. First, the institutionalised fraud on the Manila Galleon gradually disappeared (the last galleon returned from Acapulco in 1815). Second, new sources of illicit profit emerged: the prompt gangrene of the customs services, first in Manila and then in the provincial ports, opened from 1855 onwards; the massive embezzlements related to the tobacco monopoly implemented in 1781 and the migration of Chinese “coolies”, starting in the 1850s; the new possibilities offered to the governors of provinces (alcaldes mayores ) by the development of cash crop economy in parts of the Philippines, and the wealth-building— albeit unequal—that resulted from this gradual passage to an economy turned towards the exportation of agricultural products (e.g. extortions in kind or in cash, diversion of forced-labour service, etc.). Simultaneously, the appointment process of the imperial servants evolved. After the independence of Spanish America, the small number of Filipino Creoles were even more mistrusted and the metropolitan Spaniards (peninsulares ) gradually took over all the important administrative posts. The militarisation of the political power embodied by the Gobernador y Capitán General and the weakening of the traditional counter powers (the Audiencia, the Ayuntamiento and the archbishopric) caused the disappearance of an important source that reported and exposed misdoings. Albeit ambiguously, the frontier between public and private spheres was gradually clarified and reinforced.12 The abolition of the indulto de comercio (1844) is emblematic of this process. Before this date, the provincial governors could trade to their benefit, provided that they paid a fee to the royal treasury. In fact, the indulto was not a fee but a fine: the royal authorities knew that the governors were trading anyway, and the indulto was a good way for the Crown to extract money while reaffirming the prohibition of mixing public and private activities, as well as indirectly

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promoting the development of the cash crop economy in the provinces. As a whole, the central decades of the century were witness to a shift in perception of corruption in the metropolis, as in the colonies, in addition to an attempt to legally specify corruption offences and set penalties based on each violation. Ironically, these efforts in the judiciary field and normative codes coincided with an outburst of corruption in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the systematisation of illicit practices already present in the first decades. As in Burma (present-day Myanmar),13 the foremost achievement of the strengthening of the rule of law and the increasing number of the agents of colonial rule—Spanish officials and Philippine subordinates—was a spectacular outburst of briberies, extortions and embezzlements. This acceleration was closely related to imperial factors,14 especially the growing politicisation, the clientelism and the entrenchment of the spoil system that governed the appointment of public employees sent from the metropolis to the Philippines. As a consequence of this first point, but also of the improvement of the communications between Spain and the archipelago (e.g. the opening of the Suez Canal and the invention of the telegraph), the instability of public servants became a crucial point and a powerful incentive to hurry and put money aside legally, although more often illegally. As pointed by Dalmau for the case of Cuba, the fragility of the employee condition seems to have had profound consequences on cultural and moral values of the Spanish public servants.15 In the last three decades of Spanish domination, the political class, the governors general and overseas ministers were perfectly aware that the prevailing corruption was posing a danger to the Spanish domination in the Philippines, as well as in Cuba,16 albeit the chronological gap of more than a quarter of a century in the emergence of reformist then separatist ideas in the archipelago. In view of the importance of the issue, the reaction lacked scope and depth. Obviously, one of the priorities was to establish a selected, well-paid and well-trained administrative body specialised in the administration of this singular territory of the Spanish Empire. In 1870, the idea was put forward by Segismundo Moret, then minister of the colonies, taking British colonies in Asia and Dutch Indonesia as an idealised example at the very least.17 Nevertheless, the reform failed because of four main reasons.18 The reforms defended by Moret, and the kind of disconnection between metropolitan and colonial administrations he proposed, would have deprived the political

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class, the overseas minister and the Governor General of the Philippines from a large part of the administrative posts they were used to allocating to clients, political allies, friends or relatives. Actually, Moret’s reforms would have created the first crack in the patronage system, which structured the politico-administrative organisation of the Spanish Empire. Several overseas ministers in Madrid19 and several governors general in the Philippines20 courageously tackled the corruption problem, but they were themselves products of the patronage system. Moreover, convinced that the Spanish domination was based on prestige, they feared that giving too much publicity to corruption cases could be detrimental to this supposed stature. Unlike the Dutch case, studied by Kroeze,21 the mobilisation in the metropolis against the excesses of colonial administrators in the colonies was weak in Spain, especially where the Philippines were concerned. In a reversal of responsibilities similar to those pointed out by A. Anushree in British India,22 the Indios, the Chinese mestizos and, above all, the Chinese were deemed to be naturally born corrupters and, as a consequence, the illegal enrichment of fellow compatriots at the expense of despised non-white colonial subjects appeared a venial sin. Lastly, and even if the misconduct of Spanish public servants was one key factor of the discontent of the colonised Filipinos, the emerging Philippine nationalism focused its attacks against the friar orders, thus leading the Spaniards to underestimate the political significance of its corruption problem. Whether the kind of semi-privatised colonial drain the corrupted Spanish employees established in the Philippines had more of a harmful consequence for the colonisers than the more regulated exploitation systems—prevailing in neighbouring Dutch, British or French colonies— is still a matter of historical enquiry. However, it did have far-reaching and long-lasting consequences on Filipino attitudes towards the public sphere. In order to administrate the municipalities (pueblos ), collect taxes and take advantage of the exploitable workforce, the Spanish resorted, from the very beginning of the conquest, to indirect administration. That is to say, local power was confided to certain Filipinos elected by a restricted group of notables (principales ). As shown by multiple studies, municipal elections and the managing of municipal areas were the showcase for deep dysfunction, in particular in the final century of Spanish presence.23 In general, the elections opposed two factions either directly managed by the principal landholders of the village, or by straw-men at the service of the powerful. These clans, cemented by personal ties of friendship,

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family and business, were not above any kind of corruption or manipulation in order to achieve and maintain power. The prestige attached to these responsibilities was less and less significant. Nevertheless, power and public resources were used to show favour towards clients, as well as erecting obstacles for rival factions and, at least in some cases, for personal enrichment. Spanish colonial employees were placed in positions of arbitrage. They denounced ceaselessly the embezzlement and abuses of power of the “elected indigenous”, while a portion of them put a price on their support during elections, or abetted the notables in order to put pressure on the population. From this period onward, accusing someone of corruption was a prime political weapon. These accusations clearly were not intended to carry moral weight, but rather to destabilise rival factions. As Jonathan Saha exemplified for British Burma,24 the indirect rule of the Philippine pueblos was a fertile ground for crossed allegations of corruption between rival factions that Spanish employees used as “disciplinary mechanisms” (Saha) but also, unlike the British officers in Burma, as a means of personal enrichment. The municipality was not a place where civic values and public interest were instilled. Rather it was a way of surviving— for the Philippine elite—legal and extra-legal pressure from Spanish civil servants and, when the occasion presented itself, to help one’s self along the way. In the villages, predation was seen as normal, if not legitimate. As a result of the reinforcing of the Spanish colonial administration in the nineteenth century, a growing number of Filipinos were confronted, on a daily basis, by corrupt and sometimes even brutal public employees. Meanwhile, the municipality was a veritable “school of vice” and a crucible of “bad habits” which, later on, would contaminate the democratic institutions of the American period. Corruption, thus, was central in the political socialisation of the Philippines, and two hypotheses can be formed regarding the lasting consequences of this state of affairs. First, the corruption of colonial civil servants no doubt had the result of reinforcing personal and family ties. The central importance of family ties in the context of social relationships is indisputably to be found in the pre-colonial period, but the evangelisation of the archipelago and the introduction of new practices such as godparents (compadrazgo) reinforced its role at the end of a complex process of syncretism between old and new values. The daily uncertainty of the colonial situation also played an important role. By nature, the goal of a colonial state was not to protect the colonised against arbitrariness, but it could at least enact

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rules which allowed the dominated class to know the numerous duties and what few rights they had. However, the study of the archives makes clear that the lively legislative activity on the part of the Spanish, together with the dishonesty of a good number of civil servants, made it impossible for a Filipino to know what they would be dealing with when faced with the colonial administration. Simultaneously, the development of commercial agriculture meant a deterioration in the economic and social situation for a great deal of people, which further weakened their position. Faced with the absence of impartial and universal rules, the incompetence of the employees, the permanent risk of extortion and the abuse of power, family and/or clan networks offered minimal protection as well as a way of reducing risk. At the same time, everyday small-scale corruption opened an informal space of negotiation of an order imposed from outside.25 Secondly, Filipinos seemed to have established an association—a practically automatic link—between the exercising of power and personal enrichment. For the Spanish civil servants, as for the local Philippine elected officials, the game of corruption meant some risks. Nonetheless, as judicial power itself was quite corrupt, well-placed support and normally handed-out bribes meant it could be reduced. At least in the pueblos, gaining a public job was, from the end of the Spanish period, seen as an opportunity for personal gain, as well as enriching one’s family and one’s clients.

“Old” and “New” Corruption in US Times The period of US colonisation, shorter but of crucial importance for the future of the Philippines, indirectly confirms these hypotheses. Recall first that the Americans had, right from the start, a very ambitious state building project in the Philippines based on three intimately related domains: education; economic development stimulated by American capital and the construction of infrastructure; and, a point which particularly interests us here, the construction of a “tropical democracy” built on the US model. Ultimately, the Philippines were to become a showcase for democracy in Asia and the clear proof of the superiority of the Americans’ “beneficent colonialism”. The catchphrase “The Philippines for the Filipinos” made it easy to believe that the colonial apparatus put in place in the first years of the twentieth century26 was preparing to grant independence. This colonial discourse was very skilful politically, but it also

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carried a good deal of hypocrisy, issues which I do not have the space to develop here.27 As far as the administration was concerned, the colonisers put into place quite strict rules in order to guarantee the recruitment and the advancement of civil servants based on merit on one hand, and to punish dishonest employees on the other. The goal was to instil morals as well as to professionalise public functions. Administrative positions were slowly given to Philippine civil servants in order to prepare them for selfgovernment; by 1903, a little less than half of civil servants were Filipinos. The Democratic Governor General Francis B. Harrison’s (1913–1921) tenure was marked by a rapid “Philippinization” of public function, and from 1919 there were only 650 US employees (of which nearly half were actually primary school teachers), compared to 12,000 Filipinos. In 1933, 97% of civil servants were Filipinos and the US held only a handful of key positions.28 Even if the initial brief period of military administration (1898–1902) led to a new outbreak of corruption, and afterwards all the US colonial civil servants were not of irreproachable honesty, the administration seemed on the whole much more honest during this American halfcentury than during the Spanish period. This remains true, even as the Philippine civil servants who gradually replaced them occasionally committed some misdeeds. Nevertheless, historical research would be needed in order to confirm this first impression. Unfortunately, this relative period of moral instilling was more than compensated for by the gradual corruption of the political sphere. Indeed, the US decided to construct a democracy from the bottom up by opening elections to various political strata one after the other. From 1902, there were elections for municipal jobs and in 1903, by indirect votes, for provincial governors; there was voting in 1907 for the 80 elected officials of the lower chamber (Philippine Assembly) and in 1916 for the senators; finally, in 1935, there were elections for the President of the Commonwealth. The introduction of the principle of free elections was accompanied by the gradual extension of the right to vote.29 In any case, the requirements of education and fortune were frequently used to allow friends to vote or, on the contrary, to keep enemies away from the voting booth. For instance, in the province of Negros Oriental, in 1906, 59% of the regional representative members locals elected should not even have

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been allowed to vote.30 Citizens were gradually introduced to the political system, but this inclusion was done on the basis of clientele ties, and not on an individual basis. The choice of progressivity had perverse effects. As they built the political system, the US placed political, legislative and then executive power in the hands of an oligarchy composed of dominant families, from the end of the Spanish period. Often of mixed Chinese descent, they came into politics after having constructed a solid financial base, and after having assimilated large aspects of Western culture. There was, nevertheless, a partial renewing of political elites and some newcomers, such as Sergio Osmeña or Manuel Quezon, had successful political careers. Certain individuals concomitantly built fortunes which made them safe from need and multiplied their ability to mobilise a favourable electorate. US civil servants were conscious of the dangers of such a confiscation of power and of the reinforcing of the pre-existing social organisation that it led to. They had a very negative opinion of the caciques, whom they judged to be egocentric and often dishonest.31 From the earliest years of the twentieth century, the colonial observers were alarmed by the behaviour of Filipino representatives who dipped shamelessly into the public budgets to award themselves large emoluments, or who used their legislative power to lighten certain taxes, such as land taxes.32 From the beginning of the “colonial democracy” under US direction, the accusation of corruption was systematically used as a weapon to destabilise one’s enemies. Judges and colonial civil servants generally were unable to distinguish between well-founded denunciations and schemes, or false-alarms on the part of threatened representatives or employees. Relatives and clients had no scruples in terms of making false witness statements in order to protect their bosses or accuse their enemies. The political parties, whose creation was encouraged by the colonial authorities,33 were immediately infected with clientelism. In the absence of clear ideological or social divides, the parties were unstable and undisciplined collections of clientelist networks, which were made and remade according to private interests or those of the clans.34 The only stakes in an election were the installation in power of a faction which, now studiously imitating US practices, immediately applied the spoil system and placed its “political friends” in the most important and lucrative posts. Electoral campaigns became more and more costly and, in order to win votes, candidates bought electors through gifts of money or the promise of favours. Starting in the American period, local potentates (bosses) did

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not hesitate to use violence to intimidate their adversaries. Once in power, the elected official had to “thank” his electors in order to not lose face and to have a chance of staying in charge. The gradual “Philippinization” of the bureaucracy was accompanied by the delegation of important nominating powers and the ability to guide careers to the Philippine elected representatives. From 1907, Philippine deputies used their legislative power to transform certain administrative posts, which until then had been nominated by the central administration, into “political” posts where they could place their clients. Beginning in 1908, for example, municipal meetings took back control of the highly corruptible post of municipal treasurer and generously handed out exceptions to the civil service code adopted in 1901. The caciques took advantage of this weakening of the bureaucracy, and populated local and provincial administrations with their friends and relatives. Thus, they built impregnable electoral fiefdoms for themselves. Lastly, the central power had to intervene to stimulate economic growth—particularly in the sectors which interested the importers from the metropolis. The parapublic structures they built constituted profitable niches for the friends of the clans in power. The pillage of the Philippine National Bank is a good example of these new opportunities for corruption. The notables from the clan of Sergio Osmeña Sr., House Speaker for the Legislative Assembly, granted themselves loans of a considerable amount and practically for free in order to equip their properties with ultramodern sugar refineries.35 This self-interested negligence caused the bank to fail at the beginning of the 1920s and was far from the democracy dreamed of by the Americans: Doling out resources and concessions to the very ‘caciques’ and ‘bosses’ whom they had initially planned to discipline, the Americans at the apex of the colonial state had become less the tutors for democracy than the imperial patrons of a local patrimonial regime in formation.36

At no time, did the colonial powers really conduct a determined programme to eliminate corruption.37 To fight against misappropriation, from 1903 the US reconsidered its politics of large budgetary autonomy accorded to the cities and the provinces. The delicate job of provincial treasurer was given to an American, just for a few years (as discussed above). They could not, however, go too far down this path due to their initial engagements, pressure from Philippine leaders and the cost of such a centralisation politic.38 The central administration did not have

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the human means necessary to efficiently watch over the provinces and cities.39 More significantly, this partial abdication of colonial power resulted from tensions as well as insoluble contradictions between pragmatism and idealism, and between colonial discourse and the practical necessities of administrating a society that was very different from that of the metropolis. In first place, the US was confronted with an unexpected resistance war (1899–1902) and a culture they did not understand. The support of the elites was vital in order to pacify the colony. Indeed, the opening of positions of responsibility to Filipino notables turned out to be an excellent way of gaining the first collaborators, and then for “turning” the heads of resistance. Next, civil peace and collecting taxes operated through the maintenance of this collaboration and thus opened a breach in the initial political programme. The oligarchy in power was also the principle purveyor of raw agricultural goods exported to the US, so it made sense then to work with it. The creation of the contemporary Filipino state, to borrow Paul Hutchroft’s phrase, was then a joint-venture between colonial civil servants and Filipino politicians.40 The Filipinos who attained positions of responsibility were elected. They benefited from an undeniable political legitimacy, even if the democratic rules were not always respected during elections. How, under these conditions, to get rid of corrupt politicians or reject their decisions without damaging the very principles which the colonial power was trying to establish in the colony? Moreover, as the construction of the Philippine political system progressed, the Philippine elected representatives had more and more power and the colonial power’s freedom to operate tended to diminish. The US had to choose its priorities as a matter of what they thought were the vital interests, such as the international and strategic stakes, such as the infrastructure or the education system. Clearly, the eradication of corruption faded into the background since the political cost of such a crusade would have been too high. Political necessities and, to a lesser degree, economic ones thus forced the US to give more and more power to men whom it knew perfectly well would use it to further their own personal interests—i.e. those of their family and/or those of their clan. The Americans were, thus, to a large degree, trapped by their own colonial talk and, what is more, they knew it. The most farsighted US civil servants were, beginning in the twentieth century, perfectly clear on the contradictions: they felt that they were letting the wolf into the sheep’s pen while it was still being

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built.41 Nevertheless, certain US civil servants sincerely hoped that the Filipino elites would—under the watch of their democratic tutor and their education, in contact with the realities of power—edify their behaviour while they waited for the educational system to produce elites to replace the caciques. All thought that the political education of the Philippines would be a long process which would take several generations.42 Thus, in the meantime, the presence of US over-lordship was justified: once again, corruption and anticorruption were effective instruments of rule, be it colonial or not.43 The omnipresence of corruption in the Asia-Pacific zone, in states where the political structures, societies, cultures and economies have known very different courses, clearly highlights that it cannot simply be claimed that corruption is the heritage of an epoch of colonisation or Western domination. It is no less true that, at the time of independence, the young Republic of the Philippines already presented a number of characteristics foretelling the deteriorations to come. A “predatory oligarchy”, constituted by a small number of families grouped into clans confiscated, right from the emergence of modern political life, the whole of political and administrative power, thus reinforcing the economic, social and cultural domination already solidly established at the end of the Spanish colonial period. In this “oligarchic democracy”, the Filipino elites very quickly learned how to use public resources to reinforce their private fortunes. In turn, the patrimonialisation of the state permitted them on one hand to consolidate their political power by distributing favours and privileges and, on the other hand, to control an administration—into which bureaucratic rules intended to limit corruption had been introduced in the first decades of the twentieth century. However, this was weakened by the Japanese occupation and by the dramatic economic situation of the Philippines in the immediate post-war period. The attitude of the social body, faced with the absence of public ethics in political elites, is a subject that is not particularly well-known, but everything suggests that from the beginning of the nineteenth century the degree of tolerance on the part of citizens was high, or that at least the morals of the candidates were not a determining criterion in the choice of the electorate. In 1907, a large number of deputies elected to the colony’s first legislative assembly had been previously implicated in cases of local or provincial corruption.44 We still have to measure if this passivity or this resignation was primarily due to an eventual “mithridatisation”45 by the

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pluri-secular exposition of the colonised to forms—certainly diverse and dynamic—of corruption or resulted rather of distance, even of incompatibility, between part of the local cultural values and Western criteria of differentiation between licit and illicit, between the public and private spheres.

Notes 1. Corruption is understood here as “(…) a behavior which deviates from the formal duties of a public role because of private-regarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or status gains; or violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private-regarding influence”, Joseph Samuel Nye, “Corruption and Political Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis,” American Political Science Review 61, no. 2 (June 1967): 417. 2. “While technically remaining crimes, some extortion or bribery seems to have lost any earlier distinction as a cultural anomaly and appears as an expected behavior.”, Timothy Austin, Banana Justice. Field Notes on Philippine Crime and Custom (Austin Westport: Praeger Publishes, 1999), 95. 3. The most corrupt administrations have been the subject of remarkable studies conducted by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. The following two publications provide a well-informed overview: Sheila Coronel and Cecile Balgos, eds., Pork and Other Perks. Corruption and Governance in the Philippines (Quezon City: Philippines Center for Investigative Journalism, 1998); Stéphane Auvray, Roberto N. Galang and Cristina Jimenez-Hallare, Élites et développement aux Philippines: un pari perdu? (Paris: Les Indes Savantes et IRASEC, 2003). 4. Yves Mény, La corruption de la République (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 21. 5. Sheila Coronel and Cecile C. A. Balgos, eds. Pork and other Perks. Corruption and Governance in the Philippines (Quezon City: Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, 1998), 11. 6. Gary Hawes, “Marcos, His Cronies, and the Philippines’ Failure to Develop,” in Southeast Asian Capitalists, ed. Ruth McVey (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1992), 146. 7. Let us recall that the associations between “Latin” or “Mediterranean” cultures and corruption were common ground for analyses right up until the scandals of the 1980s and 1990s. This shows that corruption was not a non-existent or residual phenomenon in northern European societies and that, in turn, the southern nations were able to remediate their political and administrative mores. 8. Jeremy Adelman, ed. Colonial Legacies. The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History (New York: Routledge, 1999).

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9. For similar interrogations about Burma, see Jonathan Saha, Law, Disorder and the Colonial State: Corruption in Burma c. 1900 (Basinstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013),130–132. 10. See in this volume Pol Dalmau’s chapter. 11. Jean-Pierre Poussou, Philippe Bonnichon and Xavier Huetz de Lemps, Espaces coloniaux et espaces maritimes au xviiie . siècle (Paris: SEDES, 1998), 300–307. 12. On the evolution of formal procedures, see Xavier Huetz de Lemps, L’archipel des épices. La corruption de l’administration espagnole aux Philippines (fin xviiie siècle—fin xixe siècle) (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2006), 123–132. 13. Saha, Law Disorder and the Colonial State. 14. See the chapter by Dalmau and Rubí in this book, where this is highlighted further. 15. See in this volume P. Dalmau’s chapter. For a detailed psychological analysis of the Spanish employees in the Philippines, see Huetz de Lemps, L’archipel des épices, 251–274. 16. See in this volume Dalmau’s chapter. 17. See in this volume chapters by Ronald Kroeze and Jonathan Saha. 18. For more details the Moret reform, see Huetz de Lemps, L’archipel des épices, 279–293. 19. On Víctor Balaguer, see Rubí’s chapter in this book; on Antonio Maura see Huetz de Lemps, L’archipel des épices, 297–305; Xavier Huetz de Lemps, “Un caso colonial de corrupción sistémica. Las Filipinas al final del siglo xix,” in La justicia robada. Corrupción, codicia y bien público en el mundo hispano (siglos xvii–xx), eds. Alejandro Coello de la Rosa and Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla (Barcelona: Icaria Editorial, 2018), 263–278. 20. On Eulogio Despujol and Ramón Blanco, see Huetz de Lemps, L’archipel des épices, 297–305. 21. See in this volume Kroeze’s chapter. 22. See in this volume Anubha Anushree’s chapter. 23. Greg Bankoff, “Big Fish in Small Ponds: The Exercise of Power in a Nineteenth-century Philippine Municipality,” Modern Asian Studies 26, no. 4 (October 1992): 679–700; Xavier Huetz de Lemps, “La crise de la commune indigène à Manille au xix e siècle,” in El Lejano Oriente español: Filipinas (s. XIX) (Sevilla: Capitanía General de la Región Militar Sur, 1997), 419–442; Edilberto C. de Jesus, “Gobernadorcillo Elections in Cagayan,” Philippine Studies 26, no. 1/2 (January–June 1978): 142– 156; Glenn Anthony May, A Past Recovered (Quezon City: New Day, 1987), 30–52; Luis Ángel Sánchez Gómez, Las principalías indígenas y la administración española en Filipinas (Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 1991); Juan Antonio Inarejos Muñoz, Los (últimos) caciques de Filipinas. Las elites coloniales antes del desastre del 98 (Granada: Comares, 2015).

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24. See Saha, Law Disorder and the Colonial State and his chapter in this book. 25. For comparison purposes, see Arnaud Exbalin Oberto and Diego Pulido Esteva, “¿Una negociación del orden? Corrupción policial en la Ciudad de México, 1798 y 1849,” Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 46, no. 2 (July–December 2019): 35–57. 26. The principle phase of creation of the American colonial state was 1900– 1913. 27. The historical production on this theme is very abundant; for two very clear syntheses, see Michael Adas, “Improving on the Civilising Mission? Assumptions of United States Exceptionalism in the Colonisation of the Philippines,” Itinerario 22, no. 4 (1998): 44–66; Julian Go, “Chains of Empire, Projects of State: Political Education and U.S. Colonial Rule in Puerto Rico and the Philippines,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 2 (April 2000): 333–362. 28. Ladd, Thomas M., “Historical Origins of Philippine Centralism,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 4, no. 2 (September 1963): 51–64; Benedict Anderson, “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines: Origins and Dreams,” New Left Review 169 (May–June 1988): 11–12. 29. Franco J. Conroy, Elections and Democratization in the Philippines (New York: Routledge, 2001), 46–47. 30. Norman Owen, ed. Compadre Colonialism. Studies on the Philippines under American Rule (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1971) 33–34. 31. Go, “Chains of Empire,” 342; Paul David Hutchcroft, “Colonial Masters, National Politicos, and Provincial Lords: Central Authority and Local Autonomy in the American Philippines, 1900–1913,” Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 2 (May 2000). 32. Owen, Compadre Colonialism, 20–21, 85; Go, 2000, p. 342. 33. The first party, the Partido Federal, was founded in 1901 with the support of Taft (Hutchcroft, “Colonial Masters,” 287–288). 34. Charle H. Landé, Leaders, Factions, and Parties. The Structure of Philippine Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965). 35. Anderson, 1988, “Cacique Democracy,” 12; Paul David Hutchcroft, Booty Capitalism. The Politics of Banking in the Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998), 65–71. 36. Go, “Chains of Empire,” 351. 37. Hutchcroft, “Colonial Masters,” 293–294. 38. Owen, Compadre Colonialism, 13–75. 39. Hutchcroft, “Colonial Masters,” 289. 40. Hutchcroft, “Colonial Masters,” 301. 41. Go shows that in Puerto Rico, where the political education programme and the liberties taken by local elites were quite similar to the Philippines early on, the US then led a determined fight against corruption adopting

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a programme of centralisation. The difference with the Philippines was that the US could, on the small island of Puerto Rico, do without the local elites, Go, “Chains of Empire,” 333–362. Glenn Anthony May, Social Engineering in the Philippines. The Aims, Execution, and Impact of American Colonial Policy, 1900–1913 (Quezon City: New Day, 1984), 14–15. Ronald Kroeze, André Vitória and Guy Geltner, eds. Anticorruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Owen, Compadre Colonialism, 29–30, 70. Mény, La corruption de la République, 1992, 57 and 206.

References Adas, Michael. “Improving on the Civilising Mission? Assumptions of United States Exceptionalism in the Colonisation of the Philippines.” Itinerario 22, no. 4 (1998): 44–66. Adelman, Jeremy, ed. Colonial Legacies. The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History. New York: Routledge, 1999. Anderson, Benedict. “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines: Origins and Dreams.” New Left Review 169 (May–June 1988): 3–31. Austin, Timothy W. Banana Justice. Field Notes on Philippine Crime and Custom. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1999. Auvray, Stéphane, Roberto N. Galang and Cristina Jimenez-Hallare. Élites et développement aux Philippines: un pari perdu? Paris: Les Indes Savantes et IRASEC, 2003. Bankoff, Greg. “Big Fish in Small Ponds: The Exercise of Power in a NineteenthCentury Philippine Municipality.” Modern Asian Studies 26, no. 4 (October 1992): 679–700. Conroy, Franco J. Elections and Democratization in the Philippines. New York: Routledge, 2001. Coronel, Sheila, and Cecile C. A. Balgos, eds. Pork and other Perks. Corruption and Governance in the Philippines. Quezon City: Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, 1998. Corpuz, Onofre D. The Bureaucracy in the Philippines. Manila: Institute of Public Administration, University of the Philippines, 1957. Corpuz, Onofre D. “Western Colonization and the Filipino Response.” Journal of Southeast Asian History 3, no. 1 (March 1962): 1–23. Exbalin Oberto, Arnaud, and Diego Pulido Esteva. “¿Una negociación del orden? Corrupción policial en la Ciudad de México, 1798 y 1849.” Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 46, no. 2 (July–December 2019): 35–57.

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Go, Julian. “Chains of Empire, Projects of State: Political Education and U.S. Colonial Rule in Puerto Rico and the Philippines.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 2 (April 2000): 333–362. Guéraiche, William. Manuel Quezon: les Philippines de la décolonisation à la démocratisation. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2004. Hawes, Gary. “Marcos, His Cronies, and the Philippines’ Failure to Develop.” In Southeast Asian Capitalists, edited by Ruth McVey, 145–160. Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1992. Heidenheimer, Arnold J., ed. Readings in Comparative Analysis on Political Corruption. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970. Huetz de Lemps, Xavier. “La crise de la commune indigène à Manille au xix e siècle.” In El Lejano Oriente español: Filipinas (s. XIX), 419–442. Sevilla: Capitanía General de la Región Militar Sur, 1997. Huetz de Lemps, Xavier. L’archipel des épices. La corruption de l’administration espagnole aux Philippines (fin xviiie siècle—fin xixe siècle). Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2006. http://books.openedition.org/cvz/3103. Huetz de Lemps, Xavier. “Les colonies espagnoles au xix e siècle: un “dépotoir” administratif pour la métropole?” In Les administrations coloniales ( xixe –xxe siècles). Esquisse d’une histoire compare, edited by Samia El Mechat, 139–151. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009. Huetz de Lemps, Xavier. “Les rapports entre les Philippins et l’État à la fin de la domination coloniale espagnole.” In Philippines contemporaines, edited by William Guéraiche, 51–64. Bangkok-Paris: Irasec-Les Indes Savantes, 2013. Huetz de Lemps, Xavier. “Un caso colonial de corrupción sistémica. Las Filipinas al final del siglo xix.” In La justicia robada. Corrupción, codicia y bien público en el mundo hispano (siglos xvii–xx), edited by Alejandro Coello de la Rosa and Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla, 263–278. Barcelona: Icaria Editorial, 2018a. Huetz de Lemps, Xavier. “Las metástasis imperiales de la corrupción en la España de la Restauración.” In La corrupción política en la España contemporánea. Un enfoque interdisciplinar, edited by Borja de Riquer, Joan Lluís Pérez Francesch, Gemma Rubí, Lluís Ferran Toledano and Oriol Luján, 317–330. Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2018b. Hutchcroft, Paul David. “Predatory Oligarchy, Patrimonial State: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines.” In Patterns of Power and Politics in the Philippines. Implications for Development, edited by James F. Eder and Robert L. Youngblood, 77–102. Tempe: Arizona State University, 1994. Hutchcroft, Paul David. Booty Capitalism. The Politics of Banking in the Philippines. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998. Hutchcroft, Paul David. “Colonial Masters, National Politicos, and Provincial Lords: Central Authority and Local Autonomy in the American Philippines, 1900–1913.” Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 2 (May 2000): 277–306.

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Inarejos Muñoz, Juan Antonio. Los (últimos) caciques de Filipinas. Las elites coloniales antes del desastre del 98. Granada: Comares, 2015. Jesus, Edilberto C. de. “Gobernadorcillo Elections in Cagayan.” Philippine Studies 26, no. 1/2 (January–June 1978): 142–156. Kang, David C. Crony Capitalism. Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Kroeze, Ronald, André Vitória and Guy Geltner, eds. Anticorruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Ladd, Thomas M. “Historical Origins of Philippine Centralism.” Journal of Southeast Asian History 4, no. 2 (September 1963): 51–64. Landé, Charle H. Leaders, Factions, and Parties. The Structure of Philippine Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965. May, Glenn Anthony. Social Engineering in the Philippines. The Aims, Execution, and Impact of American Colonial Policy, 1900–1913. Quezon City: New Day, 1984. May, Glenn Anthony. A Past Recovered. Quezon City: New Day, 1987. Mény, Yves. La corruption de la République. Paris: Fayard, 1992. Nye, Joseph Samuel. “Corruption and Political Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis.” American Political Science Review 61, no. 2 (June 1967): 417–427. Owen, Norman, ed. Compadre Colonialism. Studies on the Philippines under American Rule. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1971. Owen, Norman. “The Principalia in Philippine History: Kabilokan, 1790–1898.” Philippine Studies 22, no. 3/4 (July–December 1974): 297–324. Paredes, Ruby, ed. Philippine Colonial Democracy. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1989. Poussou, Jean-Pierre, Philippe Bonnichon and Xavier Huetz de Lemps. Espaces coloniaux et espaces maritimes au xviiie . siècle. Paris: SEDES, 1998. Saha, Jonathan. Law, Disorder and the Colonial State: Corruption in Burma c. 1900. Basinstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Salamanca, Bonifacio S. The Filipino Reaction to American Rule (1901–1913). Quezon City: New Day, 1984. Sánchez Gómez, Luis Ángel. Las principalías indígenas y la administración española en Filipinas. Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 1991. Sánchez Gómez, Luis Ángel. “Corrupción y justicia colonial: procesos contra jefes de provincia en Filipinas durante el siglo xix.” In 1898: España y el Pacífico. Interpretación del pasado, realidad del presente, edited by Miguel Luque Talaván, Juan José Pacheco Onrubia and Fernando Palanco Aguado, 133–145. Madrid: Asociación Española de Estudios del Pacífico, 1999. Sidel, John. Capital, Coercion, and Crime. Bossism in the Philippines. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

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Sidel, John, and Eva-Lotta E. Hedman, eds. Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century. Colonial Legacies, Post-Colonial Trajectories. New York: Routledge, 2000.

CHAPTER 13

Colonial and Corruption History: Conclusions and Future Research Perspectives Jens Ivo Engels and Frédéric Monier

Introduction Corruption history is a relatively new area of research, existing for only a decade or so in the sense that there are conferences, scholarly debates and exchange in a regular manner.1 The linkage between corruption history and the history of colonialism is even younger, such that the conclusions in this volume cannot be viewed as definite conclusions, but rather as elements of debate that might guide future studies, or raise questions for research agendas to come. However, the topic of corruption proved to be a lens to look upon different issues in the history of political and social life, the history of social practices, norms and political debates. In the following paragraphs, we will take up some elements from the papers and from the discussions held at the related conference in Amsterdam in order J. I. Engels (B) Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] F. Monier University of Avignon, Avignon, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Kroeze et al. (eds.), Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era, Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9_13

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to identify leading paths of interest and future research. Convinced that corruption history should separate the analysis of practices (of patronage, bribery or gift-giving) and that of debates and concepts,2 we will resume our reflections in two sub-chapters. There is one similarity between corruption historians of Europe and the studies presented here: we see two schools of thought concerning the meaning of the divide between the pre-modern and the modern eras. In other words: the assessment of the changes that occurred between roughly the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries differs. One school of thought advocates the importance of substantial changes in the perception and understanding of corruption, the second school of thought rather highlights continuities between the early modern and modern worlds. There is much to suggest that this is not so much about empirical findings, but about heuristic approaches: emphasising continuities is simply asking different questions from looking for the discontinuities.3 Both are possible and complementary to each other, although the authors of this chapter explicitly prefer the emphasis on change.4 This question, which stems from recent historiographical debates on corruption, has a strong interest in the history of empires, and mostly for a comparative and connected history. The four colonial empires studied in this volume—Spanish, British, French and Dutch—share several characteristics: the metropolises are Western European countries, as well as maritime powers. These old empires have undergone many transformation processes. One of them concerns the concept of corruption, the practices it is linked to and the debates it gives rise to. At the end of the eighteenth century, these debates took on a particular political dimension. In late-colonial British America, before the War of Independence, the language of virtue strengthened intensive critics on the alleged corruption of British aristocracy.5 Some influent members of the British intellectual and political elite, with Adam Smith and Edmund Burke at the forefront, considered British colonial expansion as the very source of corruption.6 Historiography has widely documented the campaign to impeach Warren Hastings, the former East India Company Governor General of Bengal; this volume provides new and inspiring insights on its significance, and mostly on its long-term consequences. In spite of Hastings’ final acquittal in 1794, after an eight-year-long procedure, this figures out as a key moment for both the history of British empire and the history of political corruption in Great Britain. In France, the largest procedure for corruption at the end of eighteenth century took

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place at the same moment: between 1793 and 1794. The political trial that led Danton and some others to their bitter end, on the guillotine, had—in the minds of their accusers—connections with the bankruptcy of the Compagnie des Indes orientales.7 Though historiography generally considered this case to be a vivid example for the politicisation of corruption during the French Revolution, it cannot be disconnected from the existence of a colonial lobby advocating specific financial interests.8 Reformers in late eighteenth century, or early nineteenth-century Latin America, targeted Spanish colonial corruption for the latter as a motto in their claims for independence.9 As Bartolomé Yun suggests in this volume, changes in colonial control, altogether bound by commercial tensions and new mercantilist-inspired politics, certainly were determinant factors in the making of a new corruption concept. All in all, in these colonies as well as in these imperial metropolises, practices perceived as “abuses” in the relationships between elites and subalterns—and on the other hand corruption debates—proved to have a new ideological dimension, i.e. a disruptive and destabilising force. Thus, this paved the way to an era where corruption was a companion to “colonial reform”, and towards the shaping of new sets of public values, in order to legitimise colonial rule. It may not have been the case in other empires, such as Czarist Russia, which nineteenth-century Western Europeans perceived and heavily criticised as a country where corruption still existed, because “civilisation had not yet driven it away”.10

Colonialism and Practices of Gift-Giving With respect to the practices of patronage and gift-giving, several hints have been given to describe and explain changes over a longer period of time. Although there are differences between the practices of patronage, clientelism and networking, we will take them together here to simplify our argument. In fact, they all are based on systems of gift-giving. Also, very often, they are associated with the verdict of corruption.11 From Yun’s chapter, we can learn that changing family structures, i.e. the shift from big family groups to the concentration of the nuclear family, must have had an impact on practices of clientelism. In his chapter, Pol Dalmau also draws our attention on the linkage existing between gift-giving and certain patronage-based relations, which extended their informal networks between Spain and the Caribbean. These relations are depicted in novels such as My uncle the employee (Mi tío el empleado, 1887), which

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portrayed these relations as a way to criticise Spanish colonial rule in late nineteenth-century Cuba. This is a topic that would indeed benefit from further empirical research in the future. The same is true for the invitation by Jonathan Saha—that we should interpret changes in patronage practices as a corollary of changes in capitalism. From Xavier Huetz de Lemps’ chapter we can learn that new communication systems, such as the telegraph, supported the acceleration not only of communication in general, but also of networking and giftgiving arrangements in particular. Future research should absolutely take up the question of how new media and technology in general influenced patronage practices. There is, so to say, a need for a technological history of patronage and corruption. Not only technology in the traditional understanding is at stake here, but artefacts in a broader sense. Saha reminds us to take seriously the material aspects of patronage, highlighting the importance of paperwork and registers as information carriers. Documentary sources, such as local petitions against minor staff for reasons which, apparently, have little to do with corruption or embezzlement, can provide excellent raw material to understand social processes that are connected with patronage. For a long time, early modern historians have underlined the bureaucratic nature of gift-giving practices—for instance in the Papal State.12 Recently, the letters of recommendation being an integral part of contemporary French political culture have been analysed.13 Yet, the material aspect itself still needs to be further explored—including questions such as how a demand or a grant would be inscribed into the materiality of a letter or another document. The “material history” of clientelism could be extended to the history of metaphors surrounding corruption debates; as we know, the history of the word “corruption” is linked to ideas like putrefaction and decomposition, at least during the nineteenth century.14 The impact of communication technology is, however, not specific to the colonies, but rather relevant for every kind of patronage when it comes to the relationships between the centre and periphery. This leads us to the next important perspective. Colonial history is always about the relationship between the centre and periphery, as well as between the metropolis and colony. Obviously, structures of gift-giving and patronage have been crucial to govern the interactions between both. The “relational approach”, as Dalmau calls it, enables the shedding of some light on these complex practices. Some contributions in this volume show how, alongside other recent studies,15 important personal ties and patronage

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structures were to manage the far-off colonies. Gemma Rubí makes clear that not only personal ties, but also the origin of an enterprise from a specific region in the Spanish metropolis, played a role when public contracts in Cuba were at stake. Along with family ties and belonging to the same religious confession, origin from the same region was one of the three main binding powers of clientelist structures in early modern Europe.16 From European political history, we know how important personal ties and patronage have been for state-building and the integration of continental territories before the modern state emerged in the last half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. It seems very likely that similar effects can be found with respect to cohesiveness and integration in colonial empires. However, close scrutiny shows that personal networks did not only serve the centre in governing the periphery: Tanja Bührer mentions cross-cutting ties and trans-imperial networks between (former) French colonial elites and (new) British elites on the Indian subcontinent. For the history of colonialism, another important aspect should be highlighted. We know from anthropological and historical studies that gift-giving is not a unilateral practice.17 Even in the context of the highly hierarchical societies of early modern Europe, clientelism has been shown to be reciprocal.18 Thus, every person that is part of a clientelistic system has a certain position of power. This is not to say that all have been equal in these relationships, but we know that even the poorest clients had opportunities to claim their rights of exchange; for instance, when the patron did not fulfil his duties as a protector. In some cases, clients have been so important as to blackmail their patrons and to maximise, so to say, their gains from clientelistic structures.19 Of course, these findings pertain to the special culture of patronage in early modern Europe. However, being aware of the reciprocal nature of gift-giving between the centre and periphery might open up perspectives to research the room for manoeuvre for the colonised, adding in turn to studies on empowerment of population in the peripheries.20 When we approach the study of clientelism as a set of reciprocal relationships, we avoid a potentially problematic view. It would be a mistake to ascribe patronage or gift-giving cultures as being primarily, or at least much more frequent, among indigenous populations. We should not take for granted the idea that indigenous societies were characterised by kinship relations and gift-giving, as de Lemps rightly reminds us.

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Modernisation theory privileged this idea, describing clientelism as a feature of pre-modern societies and tribal structures. Nevertheless, first of all, this is empirically not true, since we know that modern societies also have their own practices of clientelism, although empirical research still is scarce.21 Secondly, this would contribute to reproducing civilising discourses and other colonists’ myths that depicted populations in the Global South as inherently “corrupt”. Instead, networks and clientelist structures did exist as well as within indigenous societies, between indigenous population and colonists, in the ranks of the colonists, between European societies and colonists, as well as inside European societies and political systems. Anubha Anushree’s case study reveals that, in some cases, both British civil servants and Indian “native” employees could act as parts of the same interpersonal patronage networks; i.e. when looking through the lenses of the British authorities as accomplices. In this sense, research on gift-giving and clientelist structures without prejudice does not divide, but rather connects the colonial metropolis and periphery. What we still have to learn is how patronage worked and in what ways it differed.

Corruption Debates and Norms The relationship between the metropolis and colony is not only structured by practices of gift-giving and patronage, but also by the discourse of corruption. Corruption being, in this sense, a judgement on the behaviour or the culture of office holders—or even whole societies. This judgement is not a juridical one in the first place, but a moral one. Deploring corruption within an administration or a tribal society always means that there are immoral and selfish acts, or at least pre-modern, immature practices at stake. The contributions to this volume show, above all, the important role of corruption allegations and corruption debates as being part of negotiation processes in the (power) relationship between colonisers and colonised, as well as between different groups on both sides of the ocean. Again, we can learn that the colonised might be—but are not in every case—the victims of the corruption discourse. The classical myth of corruption and the colony is of course the idea of the “White Man’s Burden”, alleging that modern, non-corrupt European countries would have had the task of civilising indigenous people who did not yet have the moralmoral maturity to act non-corruptly. This was an important motive in legitimising imperial rule, as argued

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in the introduction to this volume, and particularly increased from the 1880s onwards, when the idea of civilising mission became progressively important for European imperialism. Didier Guignard’s case study, on the “affaire Bruat” in 1877, sheds light on the increasing importance of such civilising discourses. In order to understand this myth, one has to know several things about European corruption thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Europe at this time, the state of corruption within a given society was an indicator of modernity, and vice versa: the more pre-modern a society, the more it was prone to corruption. The roots of this thinking go back to the time of Enlightenment, bureaucratic reforms and French Revolution, when the Ancien Régime had systematically been associated with corruption.22 Seemingly, “naturally” the degree of corruption in a certain society would show its degree of historical progress. As a corollary, this school of thought perceives geography or, better said, climate as a decisive factor, explaining cultural, political and moral differences between “South” and “North”. The “Montesquieu effect”, Pierre Bourdieu demonstrated, attributes corruption to Southern societies.23 Famous Spanish reformer Joaquín Costa y Martínez used a striking metaphor at the turn of the twentieth century. Very critical with his own country he stated that Spain remained an early modern society because of the corrupt structures still in place in the countryside. France and Prussia, in contrast, were much less corrupt and kept up with the modern morals. However, Costa reassured his countrymen there was still worse examples of corruption than that found on the Iberian Peninsula: China’s degree of corruption showed it was still caught in Medieval times, and Morocco was thought to be so thoroughly corrupt that it remained in the Iron Age.24 This argument morally legitimised his own country to continue imperialist rule over non-European territories. This myth embodies not only a legitimation to rule, but also a specific time regime, structured around past and present, backwardness and modernity, standstill and progress, which remains inscribed in the concept of corruption and anticorruption until present times. Therefore, the concept of corruption articulates a specific relationship between the dark past (equalling the uncivilised) and the industrialised and progressing present or future, describing European imperialism as the central driving force behind world history. Not surprisingly, so far, we find similar narratives legitimising European rule in the contributions to this volume, for example in the case of Dutch Indonesia. Bührer goes even further in advocating more research on

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the relationship between anti-corruption and emergent racism. Assigning corruption to indigenous societies was not only about legitimate rule, but also about fears of contamination of Europeans dealing with local people. In the case of India, Anushree tells us moral collusions were threatened as a result of interactions between the British and their indigenous counterparts. Anti-corruption measures would be actions to separate them, for instance by reducing the number of transactions between the two groups, showing that colonists were not so sure that the “superiority” of European morals prevailed in any case. The concept of corruption, therefore, did not only cement colonial rule, but could also lead to its destabilisation. First, within Europe anticolonialism often excoriated violence, arbitrariness and corruption committed by the colonists. Ronald Kroeze details how the Billiton Case contributed to public criticism of Dutch imperialism in the metropolis. Second, the dominated managed in some instances to turn corruption discourses against the ruling elites, and shuck colonial power relations from below. Simon Bolívar, Moises Prieto informs us, borrowed from Robespierre and other European traditions the myth of the disinterested honest strong man, being the only force able to combat corruption. In this case, it was the Spanish colonial regime Bolívar successfully delegitimised as a corrupt system. Rubí stresses the fight Spanish Minister Víctor Balaguer led against the “administrative immorality”, at high cost as he recognised in 1891, when complaining about the wide unrest his measures provoked. Many case studies insist on the fate of colonial reform, which intended to moralise and eventually failed to legitimise colonial rule. Dalmau describes a similar situation in Cuba, where the movement of independence used corruption allegations to call into question the Spanish colonial system as a whole. We know that in Europe, peripheral regions such as the Italian South have been described from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, by their own political representatives, as backward and corrupt.25 We should learn why they had such an interest to do so. It is important to do much more research on the symbolic uses and gains, which might derive from presenting one’s own country not only as colonialised, but also as corrupted. This is because that means, once again, that the concept of corruption, representing seemingly unilateral power imbalance for the benefit of Western European societies, might also be used to serve the interests of the colonised. Corruption, thus, teaches us much about the ambivalence of history.

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Several papers in this volume show a striking similarity to what we know from continental European corruption history. In many cases, we can detect sets of competing norms.26 The classical norm competition would be administrative rules on the one hand, and the obligation to serve one’s family, friends or networks on the other hand. Hillard von Thiessen has coined this the clash of “public interest centered norms” and “social norms”.27 Yun highlights the conflict between official laws and informative laws inside of families. However, in the context of colonial history, the set of norms might be much more complicated than in European history, because different populations from different cultural backgrounds constantly interact. Therefore, not one set of social norms, but different sets of social norms play their parts. The game is all the more complicated by the fact that Europeans might tend to see the norm systems of indigenous societies as wicked—and vice versa. Kroeze states, for the case of Dutch–Indonesian relationships, that the colonial regime tended to create double standard political rules, caused by the cultural distinction between colonisers and colonised, and also caused by a lack of resources. This double standard was an additional breeding ground for corruption practices and, above all, corruption critique in the Netherlands. It is up to future research to identify these conflicts and their implications.

Final Remarks: A Case for De-Colonising Anticorruption Policy As we know from many fields of research, colonialism is not dead—or, to put it in more academic language: structures and myths of colonial times have survived into the post-colonial era. As Anushree suggests, nowadays we still face persistent cultural clichés and mental patterns describing former colonies as intrinsically corrupt, or better said, with poorer moral standards. This general statement has concrete consequences for presentday anti-corruption policy and discourse—to an amazing degree. Since the mid-1990s, the World Bank has connected its funding with the fight against corruption; what it really meant was, to combat corruption in the Global South.28 Anti-corruption policy, combined with “good governance” strategies were meant to develop the maturity of state organisation, public administration and democracy in “developing” countries. Although the representatives of development politics knew the problem from the beginning and claimed that it would not be an instrument of

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post-colonial Western patriarchy over the “young nations”—emphasising that politicians in the Global South agreed to this agenda—of course it is. One of the leading instruments for asserting the state of corruption or non-corruption is the international “Corruption Perceptions Index”, published once a year since 1995 by the NGO Transparency International. It is based upon surveys of business leaders and experts who are asked to assess the degree of corruption in a given country. Surveys and indexes reproduce deeply rooted cultural prejudices—namely the idea of a Global South, including Russia and the Near East—as prone to corruption. As a rule, the more a country is seen as westernised and protestant, the lower the supposed degree of corruption, and vice versa.29 Some scholars took this in the literal sense and recommended the world’s politicians to find ways for “becoming Denmark” or “getting to Sweden” in their respective countries.30 Cecil Rhodes would have very much loved this kind of thought. Of course, things have slightly changed—the benchmark is no longer Britain, but now the Scandinavian countries. Moreover, the former socialist countries are included, since 1990, in the group of candidates that have to be modernised. Nevertheless, besides political patriarchy the international fight against corruption is also about economic relations and power. There is much evidence that fighting against corruption in business was and is a means to foster free trade and market integration, often to the profit of (US) multi-national enterprises.31 Hence, we should envision the de-colonisation of anticorruption policy and the so-called “anti-corruption industry”,32 but also of corruption research. This cause, however, is not so much a matter of morals or of global justice; rather, it is a matter of de-mystification. For the fight against corruption still seems to be, in the eyes of its proponents, something like a universal moral commandment, somewhat immune against scholarly scrutiny, de-construction and critical analysis. Yet, the history of colonialism and corruption shows us that this, exactly, is fruitful: a critical scholarly analysis of ways of thinking and imagining the “corrupt” and the “non-corrupt”. It can show to what extent the imagination of corruption still structures power relations.

Notes 1. Jens Ivo Engels, “La nueva historia de la corrupción. Algunas reflexiones sobre la historiografía de la corrupción política en los siglos XIX y XX,” Ayer. Revista de Historia Contemporánea 115 (2019/3): 23–49.

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2. Jens Ivo Engels and Frédéric Monier, “Pour une histoire comparée des faveurs et de la corruption: France et Allemagne (XIXe-XXe siècles),” in La politique vue d’en bas. Pratiques privées et débats publics 19e-20e siècles, eds. Jens Ivo Engels, Frédéric Monier and Natalie Petiteau (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011), 127–148. 3. Niels Grüne pleads for the “Continuity Approach” in: “‘Und sie wissen nicht, was es ist’. Ansätze und Blickpunkte historischer Korruptionsforschung,” in Korruption. Historische Annäherungen, eds. Niels Grüne and Simona Slanicka (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2010), 11– 34; as well as Francisco Andújar Castillo, “La corrupción en el Antiguo Régimen: problemas de concepto y metodo,” in La corrupcion politica en la España contemporánea, eds. Borja de Riquer, Joan Lluís Francesch Toledano, Gemma Rubí and Oriol Luján (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2018), 419–437. 4. Jens Ivo Engels, “Corruption and Anticorruption in the Era of Modernity and Beyond,” in Anticorruption in History. From Antiquity to the Modern Era, eds. Ronald Kroeze, André Vitória and Guy Geltner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 167–180. 5. Jack P. Greene, “The Concept of Virtue in Late Colonial British America,” in Virtue, Corruption, and Self-Interest. Political Values in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Richard K. Matthews (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1994), 27–54; John M. Murrin, “Escaping Perfidious Albion: Federalism, Fear of Aristocracy and the Democratization of Corruption in Postrevolutionary America,” in ibid., 103–147. 6. Bruce Buchan and Lisa Hill, An Intellectual History of Political Corruption (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 162–169. 7. Elisabeth Cross, “L’anatomie d’un scandale: l’affaire de la Compagnie des Indes revisitée,” in Vertu et politique. Les pratiques des législateurs (1789– 2014), eds. Michel Biard, Philippe Bourdin, Hervé Leuwers and André Tourret (Rennes: PUR, 2015), 251–266. 8. Bernard Gainot, “Le lobby colonial face à la représentation politique pendant la Révolution française (1789–1802),” in Vertu et politique. Les pratiques des législateurs (1789–2014), eds. Michel Biard, Philippe Bourdin, Hervé Leuwers and André Tourret (Rennes: PUR, 2015), 153–172. 9. Francisco Andujar Castillo and Pilar Ponce Leiva, eds., Mérito, venalidad y corrupción en España y América. Siglos XVII y XVIII (Valencia: Albatros, 2016); Christoph Rosenmüller and Stephan Ruderer, eds., Dádivas, dones y dineros. Aportes a una nueva historia de la corrupción en América latina desde el imperio español a la modernidad (Madrid-Francfort: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2016). 10. Pierre Larousse and Émile Littré, “Corruption,” in Grand dictionnaire universel du 19e siècle, ed. Pierre Larousse (Paris: Librairie classique

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13.

14.

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16.

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Larousse et Boyer, 1868), vol. 5; Jens Ivo Engels, “Politische Korruption und Modernisiergungsprozesse. Thesen zu Signifikanz der Korruptionskommunikation in der westlichen Moderne,” in Korruption. Historische Annäherungen, eds. Niels Grüne and Simona Slanicka (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2010), 35–54; Frédéric Monier, “‘Mais la véritable corruption n’existe plus’. Les patronages à l’ère de la critique,” in Patronage et corruption politiques dans l’Europe contemporaine, eds. Olivier Dard, Jens Ivo Engels and Frédéric Monier (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014), 13–32. Jens Ivo Engels, Die Geschichte der Korruption. Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 2014). Birgit Emich, Bürokratie und Nepotismus unter Paul V. (1605–1621). Studien zur frühneuzeitlichen Mikropolitik in Rom (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 2001). Christophe Portalez, Alfred Naquet et ses amis politiques: Patronage, corruption et scandale en République (1870–-1898) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2018); Julie Bour, Clientélisme politique et recommandations. L’exemple de la Lorraine de la IIIe à la Ve République (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2018). Jens Ivo Engels, “Politische Korruption in der Moderne. Debatten und Praktiken in Großbritannien und Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert,” Historische Zeitschrift 282 (December 2006): 313–350. Christoph Rosenmüller, ed., Corruption in the Iberian Empires. Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017). Wolfgang Reinhard, “Freunde und Kreaturen. Historische Anthropologie von Patronage-Klientel-Beziehungen,” Freiburger Universitätsblätter 139 (March 1998): 127–141. Beginning with the classical study by Marcel Mauss from 1923: Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques, (Paris: PUF, 2007). Hélène Combes and Gabriel Vommaro, Sociologie du clientélisme (Paris: La Découverte, 2015); Samuel Eisenstadt and Luis Roniger, “PatronClient-Relations as a Mode of Structuring Social Exchange,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (January. 1980): 42–77. Hillard von Thiessen, Diplomatie und Patronage. Die spanisch-römischen Beziehungen 1605–1621 in akteurszentrierter Perspektive (Epfendorf: Bibliotecha Academica Verlag, 2010). In a completely different context: Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–1950 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2015). Frédéric Monier, “‘Democratic Patronage’. Social Integration and Republican Legitimacy in France (1880s-1930s),” in Integration, Legitimation,

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Korruption. Politische Patronage in Früher Neuzeit und Moderne, eds. Ronald G. Asch, Birgit Emich and Jens Ivo Engels (Frankfurt am main: Peter Lang Verlag, 2011), 97–112; Jens Ivo Engels and Vokder Köhler, “Moderne Patronage—Mikropolitik in der Moderne. Konturen und Herausforderungen eines neuen Politikfeldes,” Historische Zeitschrift 309 (2019/3): 36–69. Robert Bernsee, “Corruption in German Political Discourse Between 1780 and 1820: A Categorisation,” Journal of Modern European History 11 (1/2013): 52–71; Ronan Chalmin, Lumières et corruption (Paris: H. Champion, 2010); Thomas van der Hallen, “Corruption et régénération du politique chez Robespierre,” Anabases 6 (October 2007): 67–82. Pierre Bourdieu, “Le Nord et le Midi: contribution à une analyse de l’effet Montesquieu,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 35 (1980): 21–25. Joaquín Costa y Martínez, Oligarquía y caciquismo como la forma actual de gobierno en España. Urgencia y modo de cambiarla (Madrid: establecimiento tipografico de Fortanet, 1901.), 699–700. Engels, Die Geschichte der Korruption. Toon Kerkhoff, Ronald Kroeze and Pieter Wagenaar, “Corruption and the Rise of Modern Politics in Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Comparison Between France, the Netherlands, Germany and England—Introduction,” Journal of Modern European History 11 (1/2013): 19–30. Hillard von Thiessen, “Normenkonkurrenz. Handlungsspielräume, Rollen, normativer Wandel und normative Kontinuität vom späten Mittelalter bis zum Übergang zur Moderne,” in Normenkonkurrenz in historischer Perspektive, eds. Arne Karsten and Hillard von Thiessen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2015), 241–286. Ivan Krastev, “When ‘Should’ Does Not Imply ‘Can’. The Making of the Washington Consensus on Corruption,” in Entangled Histories and Negotiated Universals. Centers and Peripheries in a Changing World, ed. Wolf Lepenies (Frankfurt a.M. and New York 2003), 105–126; Jens Ivo Engels, Alles nur gekauft? Korruption in der Bundesrepublik seit 1949 (Darmstadt: wbg Theiss, 2019), 143–220. Steffan Andersson and Paul M. Heywood, “The Politics of Perception: Use and Abuse of Transparency International’s Approach to Measuring Corruption,” Political Studies 57, no. 4 (December 2009): 746–767; Ina Kubbe, Corruption in Europe. Is It All About Democracy? (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2015). Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, “Becoming Denmark. Historical Designs of Corruption Control,” Social Research 80 (Winter 2013): 1259–1286; Bo Rothstein and Jan Teorell, “Getting to Sweden, Part II: Breaking with Corruption in the Nineteenth Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies 38, no. 3 (September 2015): 238–254.

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31. Peter Bratsis, “Political Corruption in the Age of Transnational Capitalism. From the Relative Autonomy of the State to the White Man’s Burden,” Historical Materialism 22 (January 2014/1): 105–128. 32. Steven Sampson, “The Anti-Corruption Industry. From Movement to Institution,” Global Crime 11 (2010/2): 261–278.

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Eisenstadt, Samuel N. and Luis Roniger. “Patrons-Client-Relations as a Mode of Structuring Social Exchange.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (January 1980): 42–77. Emich, Birgit. Bürokratie und Nepotismus unter Paul V. (1605–1621). Studien zur frühneuzeitlichen Mikropolitik in Rom. Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 2001. Engels, Jens Ivo. “Politische Korruption und Modernisiergungsprozesse. Thesen zu Signifikanz der Korruptionskommunikation in der westlichen Moderne.” In Korruption. Historische Annäherungen, edited by Niels Grüne and Simona Slanicka, 35–54. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2010. Engels, Jens Ivo. “Politische Korruption in der Moderne. Debatten und Praktiken in Großbritannien und Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert.” Historische Zeitschrift 282 (December 2006): 313–350. Engels, Jens Ivo. Die Geschichte der Korruption. Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis ins 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 2014. Engels, Jens Ivo. “Corruption and Anticorruption in the Era of Modernity and Beyond.” In Anticorruption in History. From Antiquity to the Modern Era, edited by Ronald Kroeze, André Vitória and Guy Geltner, 167–180. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Engels, Jens Ivo. Alles nur gekauft? Korruption in der Bundesrepublik seit 1949. Darmstadt: Wbg Theiss, 2019. Engels, Jens Ivo. “La nueva historia de la corrupción. Algunas reflexiones sobre la historiografía de la corrupción política en los siglos XIX y XX.” Ayer. Revista de Historia Contemporánea 115 (2019/3): 23–49. Engels, Jens Ivo and Volker Köhler. “Moderne Patronage—Mikropolitik in der Moderne. Konturen und Herausforderungen eines neuen Politikfeldes.” Historische Zeitschrift 309 (2019/3): 36–69. Engels, Jens Ivo and Frédéric Monier. “Pour une histoire comparée des faveurs et de la corruption: France et Allemagne (XIXe-XXe siècles).” In La politique vue d’en bas. Pratiques privées et débats publics 19e–20e siècles, edited by Jens Ivo Engels, Frédéric Monier and Natalie Petiteau, 127–148. Paris: Armand Colin, 2011. Gainot, Bernard: “Le lobby colonial face à la représentation politique pendant la Révolution française (1789–1802).” In Vertu et politique. Les pratiques des législateurs (1789–2014), edited by Michel Biard, Philippe Bourdin, Hervé Lewers and André Tourret, 251–266. Rennes: PUR, 2015. Green, Jack P. “The Concept of Virtue in Late Colonial British America.” In Virtue, Corruption, Self-interest. Political Values in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Richard K. Matthews, Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 1994. Grüne, Niels. “‘Und sie wissen nicht, was es ist’. Ansätze und Blickpunkte historischer Korruptionsforschung.” In Korruption. Historische

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Reinhard, Wolfgang. “Freunde und Kreaturen. Historische Anthropologie von Patronage-Klientel-Beziehungen.” Freiburger Universitätsblätter 139 (March 1998): 127–141. Rosenmüller, Christoph and Stephan Ruderer, eds. Dadivas, dones y dineros. Aportes a una nueva historia de la corrupcion en America latina desde el imperio español a la modernidad. Madrid-Francfort: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2016. Rosenmüller, Christoph. Corruption in the Iberian Empires. Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico press, 2017. Rothstein, Bo and Jan Teorell. “Getting to Sweden, Part II: Breaking with Corruption in the Nineteenth Century.” Scandinavian Political Studies 38 (September 2015): 238–254. Sampson, Steven. “The Anti-Corruption Industry. From Movement to Institution.” Global Crime 11 (2010/2): 261–278. Thiessen, Hillard v. Diplomatie und Patronage. Die spanisch-römischen Beziehungen 1605–1621 in akteurszentrierter Perspektive. Epfendorf: Biblioteca academica verlag, 2010. Thiessen, Hillard v. Normenkonkurrenz. Handlungsspielräume, Rollen, normativer Wandel und normative Kontinuität vom späten Mittelalter bis zum Übergang zur Moderne. In Normenkonkurrenz in historischer Perspektive, edited by Arne Karsten and Hillard von Thiessen, 241–286. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2015.

Index

A Accountability, 83, 155, 241, 254 Africa, 4–6, 167, 241, 254 North Africa, 243 South Africa, 213, 219 Algeria, 2, 12, 209–217, 219, 220, 222, 225–228, 270. See also France, French Empire, Second Empire, French colony Ancien Régime/old regime/“old corruption”, 2, 8, 9, 14, 35, 37, 46, 48, 49, 63, 64, 67, 73, 110, 114, 115, 176–181, 190, 196, 268, 345 The Antilles/the Antillean colonies, 245, 252, 267, 276 Appropriation, 190, 209, 212 confiscation, 212 Arabia/Arabic, 69, 218, 226 Arbitrariness, 10, 107, 112, 182, 324, 346 Asia Asian-Pacific zone, 318, 330 Central Asia, 50, 52

South Asia, 45–47, 50–52, 61, 64, 65, 81, 90, 144, 294, 312 South-East Asia, 177, 239, 243, 255 Australia, 213, 219 Austria, 180 Awadh, 50, 86–88, 97 B Baroda, 10, 88, 96, 141–143, 145–149, 151–154, 156–159 Bengal, 48, 50–52, 69, 85, 89, 94, 97, 98, 226, 340 “Black legend”, 6, 8, 214, 254 Bribes/bribery, 10, 47, 54, 56, 57, 80, 106, 107, 109–111, 123, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147–150, 153, 154, 158, 161, 173, 174, 180, 273, 294, 303–305, 307, 325, 331, 340 Bureaucracy/bureaucratization/ bureaucrat/bureaucratic, 8, 13, 31, 32–35, 56, 88, 109, 111, 148, 149, 152, 180, 188,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 R. Kroeze et al. (eds.), Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era, Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9

357

358

INDEX

192, 244–246, 268, 294–298, 300–302, 306, 308, 318, 319, 328, 330, 342, 345. See also Weberian bureaucracy administration, 33, 35, 109, 152, 188, 245, 328, 330 corruption, 8, 13, 31–35, 64, 88, 109, 148, 149, 174, 180, 188, 243, 245, 294–298, 300, 307, 308, 318, 319, 328, 330, 342 Burma. See Myanmar C Caciquismo, 240, 248, 253, 272, 285, 351 Capitalism, 24, 295, 307, 308, 312, 342 market economy, 24 Caribbean, 4–6, 12, 30, 239, 241, 243, 249, 254, 255, 280, 341 Catholic/catholicism, 49, 255 China/Chinese, 32, 178, 182, 185, 188, 302, 306, 321, 323, 327, 345 Civilising missions/civilising discourse, 2, 3, 8, 11, 186, 252 Clientelism, 3, 50, 63, 106, 240, 242, 255, 261, 272, 277, 319, 322, 327, 341–344 friendship, 27, 323 networks, 12, 27, 55, 327, 341, 344 Common good/general interest, 3, 9, 194 Concession, 174, 185, 190, 198, 211–213, 215, 217, 220–222, 247, 274, 328 license, 184, 185 paperwork, 184 public contract, 343 Conservative/Conservatism, 49, 183, 216, 222, 240, 246, 273

Cronyism, 12, 26, 27, 29, 31–36, 210, 212, 217, 277, 286 Cuba, 12, 107, 217, 222, 239, 242–247, 272, 274, 275, 277, 278, 280, 320, 322, 342, 343, 346. See also Spain, Spanish colony, Spanish dominion, Spanish Empire

D Daalii, 144. See also Gift/gift-giving Dasturi, 144 Decline, 2, 7, 8, 16, 49, 54, 55, 57, 113, 173, 177, 195, 227, 240, 242, 254, 261 Democracy/democratization, 39, 319, 325, 326, 328, 347, 349 Dutch East Indies, 178, 180, 181, 189, 197, 198, 241 Dutch empire, 65, 82, 182, 202, 242, 253, 254, 262 Dutch United East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie/VOC), 173, 177, 178, 180–182, 188, 195, 201

E East India Company (EIC), 10, 25, 30, 142, 143, 145, 151, 152, 158, 159 British East India Company (BEIC), 9, 45, 79, 141, 177, 226, 256, 321, 340 Elections, 156, 240, 246, 323, 324, 326, 327, 329 electoral corruption, 273 Embezzlement, 13, 80, 90, 146, 163, 254, 268, 270, 286, 294, 317, 324, 342 Emolument, 45, 48, 57

INDEX

Emotions, 106, 107, 114, 121, 123, 124, 210 history of emotions, 105, 107, 108, 120, 122, 130 Enlightenment/enlightened, 3, 10, 15, 24, 29, 31, 63, 64, 106–110, 114, 120–122, 127, 157, 177, 179, 345 Ethical Policy, 11, 176, 186, 187, 191, 280. See also Civilising missions/civilising discourse European, 3, 4, 7, 12, 24, 30, 32, 46, 47, 51–53, 55, 58, 61–64, 66, 81, 87, 89, 92, 107, 112, 143, 148, 155, 157, 160, 174–176, 179, 184, 188, 189, 210, 212, 214, 215, 217–223, 227, 228, 240, 241, 253, 254, 279, 293, 320, 331, 343–347. See also Western F Family, 9, 25, 27, 29, 30, 32, 35, 36, 52, 55, 69, 72, 86, 87, 90, 117, 122, 146, 163, 176, 212, 215, 220, 223, 226, 227, 229, 245, 274, 285, 298, 299, 304, 318, 324, 325, 329, 331, 341, 343, 347 ties, 32, 36, 304, 318, 324, 343 Favour/favouritism, 10, 52, 53, 56, 64, 87, 92, 107, 109, 113, 114, 117, 120, 123, 146, 154, 157, 182, 183, 185, 211–216, 226–228, 243, 247, 271, 280, 302, 318, 324, 327, 330 France, 4, 12, 28, 40, 47, 61, 62, 64, 106, 110, 115, 129, 132, 194, 209, 211, 213, 215–217, 220, 224, 228, 229, 231, 240, 340, 345 French colony, 12

359

French Empire, 8, 178, 270 Second Empire, 214, 216, 220, 222 Fraud/fraudulent, 12, 26–28, 31, 106, 147, 190, 240–242, 244, 249, 254, 255, 270, 272–276, 278, 280, 294, 305, 306, 321

G Gaekwar, 141–143, 145–153, 155–158, 160, 163, 165 Germany/German Empire, 4, 40, 194, 240, 257, 351 Gift/gift-giving, 13, 30, 47, 48, 54, 57, 90, 115, 144, 161, 176–178, 327, 340–344. See also Daalii Global/globalization, 4–7, 12, 16, 24, 27, 34, 46, 47, 49, 61, 65, 66, 106, 108, 110, 120, 124, 159, 160, 181, 190, 211, 242, 243, 254, 271, 281, 308, 318, 320, 348 history, 4–6, 34, 46, 190 transnational, 6 Good government/governance, 62, 175, 184, 190 Great Britain, 4, 25, 340 British colony, 8 British empire, 6, 8, 55, 57, 81, 94, 340

H Hinduism/Hindu, 30, 49, 52 Hyderabad, 9, 47, 50, 51, 53–62, 65, 70, 71, 73, 88

I Indentured labour, 185 Indonesia, 11, 65, 173–178, 181, 187, 189, 191, 192. See also The

360

INDEX

Netherlands, Dutch East Indies, Dutch empire Ireland/Irish, 49, 210, 214 Irrawaddy, 300, 306 Islam, 201. See also Muslim(s) Italy, 240

J Java, 177, 178, 180–182, 195–197, 243

K Khutput , 10, 11, 141, 143–146, 148, 151, 154–157, 161 Kinship, 9, 27, 36, 145, 343

L Law, 25, 26, 51, 64, 83, 108, 111–114, 143, 145, 147, 152, 153, 159, 160, 177, 179, 184, 218–222, 224, 226, 252, 271, 277, 279, 280, 298, 306, 310 illegal (according to the law), 318, 323 legal, 51, 83, 115, 143, 160 Liberal/liberalism, 11, 24, 48, 92, 115, 179, 180, 182, 183, 187, 196–198, 200, 210, 214, 216, 220, 222, 223, 230, 240, 243, 246, 270, 273, 278, 280, 321

M Madras, 48, 85 Maladministration, 121 Marxism Marx, 296, 309 Mercantilism/Mercantile system, 24, 31, 34, 40, 61, 82, 341

Metropolis/Metropole/Metropolitan, 1, 4, 7, 9, 11, 12, 26, 28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 46, 48, 55, 56, 60, 63–65, 106, 115, 142, 155, 157–159, 175, 177, 178, 181, 191, 210, 213, 214, 217, 219, 224, 241–243, 246, 247, 249, 252, 254–256, 258, 265–267, 270, 271, 278, 279, 320–323, 328, 329, 340–344, 346 Mexico, 107–109, 166 Misuse, 2, 3, 11, 106, 174–176, 182–186, 188, 190, 212, 219, 244 of office, 3, 106, 176 Modernity/modernisation, 3, 9, 24, 30, 31, 46, 65, 188, 189, 192, 242, 267, 344, 345 progress, 176, 178, 188. See also Civilising missions/civilizing discourse, European, Western Monopoly, 27, 177, 225, 229, 274, 275, 321 trade monopoly, 26, 181 Moral/morality, 3, 8, 10, 11, 14, 25, 29, 38, 54, 57, 58, 81–85, 87, 90–94, 106, 107, 118, 121, 122, 152, 154, 158, 166, 174, 176, 178, 179, 182, 186, 187, 190, 191, 193, 210, 214, 266, 268, 270, 277, 286, 319, 322, 324, 326, 330, 344–348 Mughal/mughal government, 50–53, 55, 56, 64, 67–69, 144, 226 Muslim(s), 49, 52, 55. See also Islam Myanmar, 2, 13, 83, 190, 201, 294–298, 302, 307, 308, 310, 322 N Nagpur, 80 Nazars , 91. See also Gift/gift-giving

INDEX

Nepotism, 10, 25, 29, 32, 33, 35, 36, 106, 107, 116, 174, 178, 182, 192, 286, 319 The Netherlands, 4, 30, 38, 40, 175, 177, 178, 180–183, 186, 192–195, 213, 240, 242, 256, 280, 347, 351 Batavian Republic, 177, 178 Dutch East Indies, 178, 180, 181, 241 Dutch Empire, 182 Holland, 28 Nigeria, 2 Norms competition of, 175, 181, 187, 188 Normenkonkurrenz, 63, 73, 194, 200, 351 plurality of, 175, 182, 183 Nuzzarana, 144 O Oligarchy/oligarchic, 179, 240, 327, 329, 330 Orientalism other(ing), 64 Ottoman Empire, 5, 180 P Parliament, 2, 48, 49, 86, 155, 156, 159, 183, 185, 186, 198, 212, 216, 222, 226, 252, 267, 271, 275, 278 Patronage, 3, 13, 26, 27, 29, 31, 34–36, 48, 53–57, 59, 61, 65, 123, 144, 155, 159, 173, 174, 176–179, 182, 214–217, 245–248, 256, 276, 277, 279, 286, 323, 340–344 Periphery, 66, 247, 272, 342–344 Persia/Persian, 50, 52, 53, 55, 161, 162

361

Peru, 26, 243 Petition(s)/petitioning, 110, 147, 153, 190, 277, 304, 306, 342 The Philippines, 13, 160, 175, 239, 242, 243, 253–256, 261, 262, 267, 281, 317–325, 330, 332–334 Portugal/Portuguese Empire, 28, 153, 240, 254, 256 Privilege, 49, 51, 63, 117, 176, 178, 179, 188, 214, 246, 280, 318, 330, 344 Priyayi, 181, 198 Protestant, 11, 49, 348 Orthodox-Protestant, 187 Prussia, 211, 213–215, 345. See also Germany/German Empire Public official, 27, 267, 279 administrator, 183 civil servant, 26, 174 Public opinion media, 342 newspaper, 121, 149, 180, 183, 184, 191, 249, 252, 253, 275 press, 2, 159 public debate, 155, 176 Public-private divide, 176, 179, 241 Puerto Rico, 239, 243, 267, 270, 333, 334

R Republicanism/republican, 177, 215, 216, 222, 223, 230, 252, 253, 278 Revolution Atlantic Revolutions, 267 French Revolution, 33, 58, 63, 64, 66, 110, 176, 179, 341, 345 River plate region, 108

362

INDEX

S Scandal(s) affair(s), 58, 59, 142, 209 case, 2, 3, 9, 11, 46, 65, 142, 175, 185, 188, 212, 256, 267 Separation of powers, 181, 182, 184, 188, 189 Slavery, 109, 197, 265, 266, 271, 273 Smuggling, 25, 27, 30, 38, 185, 249, 274, 306 Socialism/Socialist/Social-Democrat, 179, 348 South America/Latin America, 4, 5, 10, 24, 84, 107, 110, 117, 120, 214, 241, 254, 268, 281, 341 Sovereign/sovereignty, 25, 35, 51, 81, 83, 88, 92, 105, 110, 111, 119, 142–144, 153, 160, 177, 224, 280 Spain, 4, 12, 14, 16, 25, 27, 28, 30, 38, 39, 105–107, 110, 115, 117, 120, 217, 239, 240, 242–249, 252, 253, 255–259, 261, 265, 266, 268, 270–272, 274, 278, 280, 282, 283, 285, 320, 322, 323, 341, 345 Spanish colony, 12 Spanish dominion, 239 Spanish Empire, 12, 16, 23–26, 28–30, 32, 33, 39, 129, 242, 245, 247, 254, 256, 266, 270, 281, 322, 323

T Taxation, 63, 183, 185, 186, 197 taxes, 25, 33, 46, 163, 178, 182, 242, 244–246, 277, 293, 298, 301, 317, 323, 327, 329 tax farming, 174, 176–178, 181, 188 Thugyi, 298, 299, 301 Traditional, 3–5, 7, 9, 49, 63, 64, 144, 189, 190, 320, 321, 342 feudal, 189 U United States (US), 13, 214, 239, 266, 319, 333 American colonies, 265 W War, 29, 30, 47, 49, 54, 61, 66, 69, 85, 117–119, 121, 123, 181, 211, 215, 216, 224, 239, 244, 266, 268, 269, 271, 272, 274, 275, 280, 321, 329 Weberian bureaucracy, 32 “Weberian style bureaucratization”, 174. See also Bureaucracy/bureaucratization/ bureaucrat/bureaucratic Western, 16, 152, 175, 218, 224, 228, 319, 327, 330, 331, 348. See also European; Modernity