What we tend to understand as corruption today – the abuse of public office for private gain – is an outcome, Nicholas Wilson (Reference Wilson2023) tells us in his luminous new book, of social, political, and institutional struggles over the long eighteenth century. Even so, he argues, this stark if somewhat stripped-down behavioral notion is at best a misrecognition of the competing forces lurking underneath the façade of universality and impartiality. Rather, in Wilson’s telling, the concept is much better understood as a relational idea through the contexts in which accusations of corruption remain embedded and which provide variable sets of evaluative criteria to ascertain good from bad behavior.

This embeddedness is drawn out by the primary conceptual move of Modernity’s Corruption: that there are, in fact, two simultaneous and competing moral orders that we inhabit, the “Situational” and the “Universal.” The former relies principally on local contexts in its determination of acceptable behavior, while the latter appeals to as-if universal moral understandings. Against this background, Wilson deploys a “model of corruption,” involving the mechanisms of morality, abstraction, biography, and escalation. Corruption accusations entail moral judgments transcending peculiar circumstances to invoke abstract general principles. Such accusations rely on the moral biographies of actors and institutions, which are represented to audiences outside the domain of a given conflict to expand their scope. Situational claims are tied to contextual processes, where their abstraction and escalation stick to familiar settings, and the embroiled biographies refer to local knowledge systems. Universal claims, on the other hand, attempt a disembedding from local contexts, where corruption accusations are escalated to unfamiliar settings and all actions are judged according to a strictly defined and unchanging moral background. Wilson deftly argues that this latter configuration of corruption emerged as the “modern” form over the eighteenth century.

British imperial expansion in South Asia is the explosive setting where Wilson tracks corruption’s epochal transformation. Rereading social theory alongside the East India Company’s (EIC) long presence in the subcontinent, he recasts the familiar story of British ascendancy through the lens of the moral orders interconnecting Britain and India. In Britain, rationalism and empiricism combined in the thought of Hobbes and Locke to produce a universal conception of moral order, manifested in the notion of a unitary self. Mandeville and Hume, on the other hand, epitomized a situational order of politeness by reviving republican ideas of a fractured, composite self – tracing a lineage back to Aristotle – that derived its personality from the tussle between reason and the passions. It was ultimately the moral philosophy of Adam Smith, Wilson maintains, that paved the way for the modern notion of the self. In the impartial spectator, Smith reconciled local contexts of judgment with a prescriptive idea of propriety and action independent of circumstance.

In India, the EIC’s insularity from Indian society and British observers facilitated a situational order that endured till the era of territorial sovereignty in the eighteenth century. The compulsions of country trade, which sutured moral behavior to interpersonal relationships and individual personality, instigated reforms at Company factories that directly echoed the regulatory principles of politeness in English society, while constraining conflicts within organizational remits. As the EIC became further embroiled in the political affairs of South Asia, its longstanding insulation was consistently breached by the escalation of moral conflicts into the ruling elites of Britain and India. Bengal and Madras became great objects of political scrutiny in Britain, generating a universal account of corruption as a distant audience legislated on moral behavior in India. So, too, did internal struggles over EIC government, which prompted new policies based on predictability and constancy. Over time, administrators of British India sought to nullify local contexts of corruption through what Wilson terms the “empowered state,” with its apparatuses of law and bureaucracy. Experience and character as the basis of government gave way to a formalized set of rules of action, coinciding with the Smithian idea of the self.

In excavating this story, Wilson weaves together social theory, political thought, and imperial history, yielding fascinating new insights. For instance, the voluminous literature on EIC “corruption” runs the gamut of avarice, clandestine trade, and imperial aggrandizement, where the category of corruption retains a stable but unelaborated meaning, as though we know it when we see it. Wilson shows, however, that there is a great deal to unpack in the charges of venality and bribery that might ordinarily seem straightforward: what counts as corruption and why shifted over time, even if the idea appears to have maintained a veneer of immutability. These justifications, in turn, are not ad hoc formulations but rather unveil intellectual and political transformations that are often elided. George Macartney’s role in reorientating imperial administration to the service of an abstract and largely ambiguous “public” or the contingent development of the empowered state under Cornwallis (contra Macpherson) are salutary examples of what one might miss with a sole focus on personal enrichment.

Corruption thus becomes a potent, if contested, signifier of social and political order. For political theorists, Wilson’s argument serves to highlight why the concept has so often occupied the interstitial space between ideal and nonideal theory, and between the universal and the particular. Since the discipline’s inception, corruption has remained the flip side of virtue, a movement away from ideal-types: it has stood in for degeneration, decay, disintegration, and debasement, from self-indulgence and luxury to enfeeblement and entropy. Politically, corruption has entailed adverse changes in foundations or constitutions, resulting in a decrease of dignity, quality, character, or value, a disease of the body politic, and the loss of integrity or fidelity to principled action. In the republican tradition, for example, factions were the surest sign of corruption. It is striking that almost all of these themes make an appearance in the EIC’s transformation through the long eighteenth century.

One important episode that is conspicuous by its absence is the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings. Historians, especially historians of political thought, take the trial to be the founding political drama of British India, the apotheosis of a chaotic period of conquest and expansion that paved the way for imperial reform and a more sanitized form of alien rule. Wilson seems to suggest, however, that the trial was not the crescendo of the processes unleashed in the 1750s but instead the after-effect of a moral transformation in the 1770s that centered heavily on Robert Clive and the slippery notion of corruption. In this view, the crucial protagonist of imperial critique was not Edmund Burke but, rather, William Bolts, who anticipated Burke’s denouncement of “geographic morality.” Would that be an accurate interpretation of the argument? If so, it would seem to be a rather important corrective to several interpretative strands of the history of British India.

Moreover, it would be good to learn from Wilson about what appear to be some broader claims regarding state formation and structural change lurking underneath the surface. Many scholars have highlighted the EIC’s importance to the system of “Old Corruption,” but one might infer from Wilson’s argument that the corporation was also pivotal in shaping the contours of the British state as it moved through economic reforms and the nineteenth-century revolutions in government. The creation of “modern moral spaces” in India suggests that a cultural revolution took place outside Britain that compelled a spate of reforms which correspondingly transformed the British state. External dynamics also appear salient to the eighteenth-century reformulation of virtue and its adaptation to commercial society. The actions of EIC officials in India had to be understood within the growing recognition that commerce, including luxury and profit, was vital to the survival of the early-modern republic. In Wilson’s argument, the imperial activities of the EIC can be seen to be as important to “commercial humanism” as the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Modernity’s Corruption is not, therefore, merely a book about corruption, but how thinking with corruption can reveal new perspectives about contemporary social worlds. Some questions persist: for instance, what accounts for the stickiness of the modern universal definition of corruption, even when we make concessions for situational transgressions? Is this a story only about Britain and India, or a more general story about imperial transformations in the transition to modernity? In other words, is it, as the subtitle states, about the making of British India, or, as the argument suggests, about the making of the modern world? These questions need not be fully answerable, but they attest to the remarkable range of Wilson’s book and the wider conversations it generates. In that sense, it is an intellectual tour de force and a landmark contribution to social science history.