Abstract
Reviewed by: Pol Dalmau, Leibniz Institute of European History, Germany
Recent years have witnessed a resurgent interest in the history of corruption, as evidenced by new research projects in France, Germany and the Netherlands, as well as by renewed efforts in other parts of the world such as Latin America and Spain. While some scholars even speak of a ‘new history of corruption’, the bulk of this new literature explores the practices and changing meanings of corruption in the past. The eruption of scandals, exposure of shady relations between politicians and businessmen, and the impact of accusations in the public sphere are some examples of the subjects tackled. Far less attention, in contrast, has been paid to how past societies dealt with the problem of corruption, and that is precisely where the book edited by Ronald Kroeze, André Vitória and G. Geltner makes an original contribution. The authors convincingly argue that the study of corruption should not be circumscribed to the misconduct of those in power, but rather should also include the reactions which such behaviour provoked and the measures that societies developed to identify and curtail the wrongdoing. The object of analysis therefore moves beyond the simple (yet still indispensable) question of what was understood by corruption at a given time and place to an examination of broader intellectual debates over ideal forms of government and how these were shaped by historical change.
In addition to this fresh perspective, the book presents two other noteworthy features. The first is a comparative, long-term approach that is infrequently to be found in a case-study-driven body of literature. A total of 20 contributions cover a timespan divided chronologically into five sections: Antiquity, the Middle Ages, Early Modernity, ‘From Early Modern to Modern Times’ and Modern and Contemporary History. The period covered is thus long enough to illustrate the varying forms of anticorruption efforts in societies ranging from Ancient Greece, Medieval France and Tudor England to the pompously self-proclaimed corruption-free German Democratic Republic. This extremely diverse group of places and periods is joined under a broad research question, namely ‘how to frame processes of modernization and their impact on the history of anticorruption’ (4). The debate among historians in recent years over whether a watershed moment in the understanding of corruption occurred at the end of the eighteenth century presumably explains why the section ‘From Early Modern to Modern Times’ receives special attention, measuring a total of seven chapters. Notwithstanding, the attention in Democratic Athens or the Late Roman Republic given to several types of misconduct, such as bribery and electoral fraud, is a reminder that the fight against corruption did not begin with the birth of the modern state, but is part of a larger and in fact much more complex story.
The second additional merit is the editor’s effort to transcend the boundaries of the academic debates to engage with current debates over corruption in terms of public opinion. Over the last two decades, governments and international organizations have implemented a wide range of anticorruption initiatives that are indicative of a new approach to the problem. Hence, while previous interest sought to determine why corruption was particularly endemic in certain countries – especially in the Third World, more recently social scientists and policymakers have turned their attention to the supposedly least corrupt countries, with an eye towards developing universal models – the so-called ‘path to Denmark’ being the best example. Against this backdrop, the book convincingly argues that any meaningful analysis of corruption must be based on a contextual approach that is wary of universalist definitions implicitly holding up the ‘West’ and its associated values (market economy, liberal democracy and Weberian-inspired bureaucracy) as the only path towards a corruption-free society.
Moreover, the contributions demonstrate that political entities often labelled as highly corrupt, such as the Ottoman Empire, can provide valuable examples of measures implemented to stop misconduct in public office. Likewise, a more careful examination beyond the stereotypes reveals that the reduction of corruption in the Scandinavian countries was far from a clean-cut product of modernity. In the case of Denmark, for instance, the emergence of a new corps of civil servants was the product of an absolutist king who saw meritocracy, rather than aristocratic condition, as the best means to consolidate his rule. Examples such as this should alert us against teleological approaches that persistently identify corruption with backwardness in historical development. Instead, the book shows the multifaceted nature of a political phenomenon that all societies throughout history have encountered in one form or another. All this should serve to inspire new policies that no longer reproduce a standardized version of Eurocentric approaches, and which could be more sensitive to the specific context and dynamics in which corruption takes place.
While the long-term panorama of the book supports these arguments, in reality these larger reflections are produced more by the chronological progression of the manuscript than by the individual contributions. In other words, the periods covered are presented through several discrete, self-contained chapters, and despite the valuable afterword of renowned sociologist Michael Johnston, the book leaves it to the readers to draw their own conclusions regarding the evolution of anticorruption policies and debates. Similarly, the comparative value of the work arises more from the inclusion of different countries and periods than from a systematic effort to relate them. However, this does not overshadow the merit of a work that has managed to gather such a large number of specialists working on such different periods in history. All the more so when the result is a fresh perspective on the study of corruption.