Modernity’s Corruption by Nicholas Wilson is a strikingly original book. Its inspiration, according to Wilson, is to reflect on “how we think about corruption today.” There are two main definitions of corruption, he suggests. Prior to the eighteenth century, corruption was conceived as an individual failing, a loss of self-control and of “balance among unstable passions” (Wilson Reference Wilson2023: 17). This was a “situational” form of morality, insofar as charges of corruption could depend variably upon one’s passions or one’s nature, on specific local conditions such as commercial exchanges and state treaties, or on individual peers, both Indian and British. Moral regulation depended upon flexible behavioral forms such as politeness, which could be adjusted to fit individual circumstances. The modern and universalist view defines corruption as deviation from a sense of public duty in one’s behavior and as bending morality toward one’s private interests or passions.

Wilson argues that the situationalist and the universalist understandings of corruption were associated with two distinct moral orders present in British thought between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. He shows how these two approaches differentially shaped responses to the political, cultural, and intellectual conflicts that defined eighteenth-century East India Company (EIC) activity in India. He is especially interested in the ways these understandings influenced the ways administrators interacted and fought with one another, sometimes over policy but also over their legitimacy as agents of the EIC.

One of the book’s most compelling examples of the situational approach to morality involves Robert Clive, the first Governor of Bengal. Clive was charged with corruption in 1772 due to the enormous wealth he had amassed through his dealings with Indian elites. Defending himself before a parliamentary committee, Clive articulated a situational ethics, stating, “Am I not rather deserving of praise for the moderation which marked my proceedings? … Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!” (Wilson Reference Wilson2023: 1).

Wilson also presents several officials who framed their practices in universalist moral terms. Charles Macartney, appointed as Governor of Madras in 1780, described himself as an impartial judge, unswayed by passions and interests (Wilson Reference Wilson2023: 150). Macartney framed his actions in terms of abstract justifications and claims to serve the public (ibid: 155–156). Here, the “public” was defined not as an aggregation of close peers but as an “amorphous domain of public life” (ibid: 157).

George Trevelyan, who spent several years in India as a civil servant (Anon Reference Hugh1911), presents a second example of a universalist ethics. Trevelyan’s (Reference Trevelyan1864) novel The Competition Wallah supported the competitive exams the Company was introducing to its civil service as part of a wider set of reforms. This means that the entire colonial state, in Wilson’s reading, was coming to be grounded in a universalist ethics. Describing “the career of a civil servant in India,” Trevelyan wrote (Reference Trevelyan1864: 148–9):

Wilson does not interrogate the truth of this claim, and he need not. That terrain has been ploughed by numerous other historians. The key point for Wilson is that by the end of the eighteenth century, most officials defined their behavior in terms of “abstracted social spaces that could compel their senses of duty” (Reference Wilson2023: 43).

These two understandings of corruption and moral order are connected to different regimes of colonial activity, policy, and administration. The situational approach was linked to a condition in which EIC factories were commercial organizations embedded in Indian society with limited sovereignty, in contrast to the full territorial sovereignty claimed by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial state. Eventually, the Company acquired armed forces, and in 1757, it began extracting revenue through land taxation. This was the beginning of the unwinding of the EIC, which was dissolved in 1874 and folded into the larger British Empire. The result was a full-fledged colonial state grounded in a “rule of colonial difference” (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1993). There was an increasing distance between the British-dominated colonial state – the Raj – and its Indian subjects.

I have four broad critical comments. The first concerns the limits of the concept of moral grounding, and specifically whether colonialism can properly be discussed in terms of a moral order at all. Peter Strawson refers to an alternative to moral life that he calls the “objective attitude,” which he sees as “profoundly opposed” to the “involvement or participation in a human relationship” shaped by moral attitudes (Strawson Reference Strawson1963: 194). Stephen Lukes argues that there are limits to morality when such an “objective attitude” treats others as being beyond the human pale – which describes certain colonial situations. Nor did Émile Durkheim, another philosopher-turned-sociologist and the founder of the sociological study of morality, make morality coextensive with all of social behavior. In his lectures on Moral Education, Durkheim argued that colonial situations represent a moral vacuum for the colonizer – and he seems to have had contemporary colonialism in mind. The European in a colony, Durkheim writes, is seized by a “kind of bloody foolhardiness” when confronted by “races he deems inferior,” leading him to assert his own superiority “without object or reason.” This represents “a veritable intoxication, an excessive exaltation of self, a sort of megalomania, which goes to the worst extremes … overflow[ing] in violence” (Durkheim Reference Durkheim1964: 34; Steinmetz Reference Steinmetz2024). Modern colonialism may prevent any correspondence between morality and social structures. If so, it is anomic, a form of “social pathology,” according to Durkheim.

Indeed, if Trumpism represents a move beyond any shared moral ground, as Wilson suggests later in his book, one is led to ask whether the concept of moral grounding is indeed the overarching, most general concept in sociology. Are there forms of “sociation” outside of moral grounding?

There are several possible answers to this question. The first, suggested by Durkheim, is that modern colonies are morally anomic. The second is that a subset of social practices in modern colonies is framed in terms of moral groundings, while other realms are morally unregulated. A third possibility is that the very fluidity of interactions between British and South Asians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – their lack of conformity to preexisting social formats – may have allowed moral codes to flow across the civilizational boundaries between colonizer and colonized in ways that gradually become less possible during the modern era. In order to understand such flows, we would need to know more about the moral backgrounds on the Indian side.

A second question concerns Wilson’s argument that universal moral codes increasingly structured colonial practices in the modern period. This is surprising at first glance, given theories of the modern “rule of colonial difference” or the “global color line” (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1900: 95; Reference Du Bois1906), which suggest that colonialism is characterized by non-universalist, often binary ideologies, for example in the division between European and “Native” legal systems. One might argue instead that situational ethics continued to structure many colonial statements and practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, interwoven with universal codes. The modern official in a colony was referred to, for good reason, as the “man on the spot,” suggesting an emphasis on improvisational flexibility rather than following general rules of action.

The third point concerns differences in British practices in the colony and the metropole. Wilson suggests that the same moral orders were being used in British conflicts in India and in England. This stands in some tension with the idea that the EIC was a semi-autonomous institution. Wilson’s account suggests that the main direction of causality runs from Britain to the overseas EIC. But in some of the book’s more detailed accounts, the rawness of intra-British struggles in India seems overdetermined by the small size of the local colonial field of power, sharpening the differences originating in the metropole and perhaps conferring new values on some of them.

The fourth point relates to the author’s move away from an explicit language of social fields, which he used in earlier work (Wilson Reference Wilson2011). Many of the struggles described in Modernity’s Corruption strongly suggest field dynamics. Wilson mentions the class, professional, and family backgrounds of some Company servants and alludes to their changing “prosopography” (Reference Wilson2023: 219), but he does not connect these social properties to the variable use of “situational” or “universal” approaches. An implicit model of a colonial field of power or colonial state field seems to be operating in the background. It would be interesting to know whether and how social properties were refracted (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1996 [Reference Bourdieu1992]; Wilson Reference Wilson2011) by the field of the Company state. Some key figures among the early moral universalists, such as Macartney and Cornwallis, were not socialized within the EIC. This raises the possibility that their distinctive moral codes were linked both to their original social properties and to their subsequent trajectories through different fields. It would also be interesting to know whether moral registers combined with other postures of distinction and axes of dispute in this field, and how these logics fit together – or how they failed to do so. In other words, what else might we find inside Wilson’s “totality”?

Modernity’s Corruption is an exemplary work of historical sociology. This book’s central contribution is its integration of the reawakened sociology of morality with the dynamic interdisciplinary arena of historical empire studies. The book reminds us that the colonizer-colonized boundary has been drawn in very different ways over the course of the modern era. I am thinking of the currently overextended concepts of genocidal and settler colonialism and the idea of colonialism being universally organized around the category of a racial color line. These ideas do not capture all of the varied forms in which colonialism has presented itself. Modernity’s Corruption reminds sociologists to move beyond foreshortened historical sensibilities, especially in a present-day conjuncture in which sociology often seems unable to take seriously, or even to perceive, anything that happened before the twenty-first century.