I

In 1761, the Diputación Foral of Gipuzkoa, the permanent assembly of the Basque province within the Spanish monarchy, requested to be exempt from the general reform of municipal treasuries that had been promulgated one year earlier. The deputies of Gipuzkoa argued that the new norms infringed upon their fueros (regional laws) and fiscal exemptions. The Consejo de Castilla, the highest court in the Spanish monarchy for the affairs of the crowns of Castile and Aragon, advised the monarch against excepting Gipuzkoa from the general reform. The councillors argued that the provincial fueros were not being violated and that no new tax was to be collected. Municipal accounts would be revised by a new office, rather than by the clerks of the Diputación Foral. The corregidor, the highest representative of the monarch in the province, was not surprised by the reaction of the deputies, as several provincial treasurers, clerks, and officers were relatives of the deputies and saw the reform as a threat to their handsome salaries. Besides, the corregidor denounced the irregularities committed by the provincial officers, and defended the application of the reform to the towns and the Diputación of Gipuzkoa. The members of the Consejo de Castilla agreed that the reform had to be extended to the Basque province, arguing:

Although the king ratified his decision of maintaining the prerogatives of the Diputación Foral, this episode exemplifies a phenomenon studied by historians in recent decades, namely the link between corruption and political reform. Royal ministers and officers justified the necessity of introducing changes in the management and supervision of the municipal treasuries in the abuses committed by the deputies and officers of the Diputación of Gipuzkoa. At first glance, the process appears logical: corruption and abuses justify the implementation of reforms to eradicate them. Yet things are not always what they seem. Was corruption the main cause of reforms in south-western Europe, or rather did reformers invoke corruption and/or even redefine it to legitimize the introduction of changes? Moreover, were corrupt and abusive practices perceived as such before reforms or after them? Were the two causally linked at all? In short, what was the exact relation between corruption and political reform, if any?

Among social sciences, historiography is a latecomer to corruption issues. While some scholars have denied the existence of corruption prior to the modern era, arguing that there was no distinction between public and private spheres, and therefore public offices could not be abused for private benefit, other authors contend that corruption was widespread and inherent to pre-modern societies, and that it served as a lubricant for those political entities. Today, there is wide historiographical consensus that some behaviours and practices were perceived as abusive, fraudulent, or corrupt and, as such, they were denounced, prosecuted, and punished; however, others that today would be unacceptable – for instance, patronage – were not seen as corrupt in the early modern period. It is the mission of historians to contextualize these practices in the societies in which they took place, offering complex and historical views of corruption, and trying to avoid anachronism, linearism, and teleology. Corruption in the early modern period (and today) must therefore be understood as an ever-changing concept. It was shaped by actors generally involved in conflicts, actors who used it as a political weapon against their rivals. Put differently, corruption was a contextual phenomenon, constantly redefined by actors who accused their rivals of misbehaviour to gain political, social, or economic power.Footnote ²

Transformations in the perception of corruption were continual and ran parallel to political changes. In recent years, historians have devoted time and effort to clarifying whether a transition from pre-modern perceptions of corruption to modern ones occurred, and, if it did, when, how, and why it happened. While Engels argues that there was a caesura between pre-modern and modern conceptions of corruption around 1800, authors like Grüne dismiss such a sharp differentiation and emphasize the continuity between the pre-modern and the modern periods.Footnote ³ An increasing number of works challenge the idea that there was no separation between the public and private spheres prior to the modern era.Footnote ⁴ Knights has observed a transformation in the ways of holding offices in Great Britain: while in the early modern period officeholding was based on personal ties and loyalty, in the nineteenth century it implied the acceptance of abstract rules and impersonal procedures. Over the centuries, a clearer separation between public and private spheres developed.Footnote ⁵ In his study about British India, Wilson has interpreted changes as a transition from situational corruption, based on circumstances that were familiar to the actors involved, to universal notions of corruption, which meant judging behaviours and practices against moral standards unrelated to local circumstances. Empire formation and difficult communication between Great Britain and India due to distance were the main drivers behind that transition from situational to universal views of corruption.Footnote ⁶

Specialists on historical corruption agree that changes were neither obvious, nor linear, nor irreversible, and that different scales of power must be analysed.Footnote ⁷ There is also consensus that transformations of the notions of corruption were linked to state formation, and that a crucial transition period must be located in the mid-eighteenth century, but they nuance chronology. While the authors co-ordinated by Kerkhoff, Kroeze, and Wagenaar locate the transition in a long nineteenth century, the historians who participated in the volume edited by Félix and Dubet consider that the consensus around corruption in fiscal affairs of the first half of the eighteenth century broke around 1750, although the wars of the reign of Louis XIV and the 1740s were crucial moments. Wilson situates change around 1780, and Engels argues that transformations occurred circa 1800, but warns against big-bang views of the transition between perceptions of corruption. Knights accepts that the second half of the eighteenth century was a moment of transformations, but argues that changes happened in a ‘long early modern period’ that covered the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote ⁸

Regarding the polities of south-western Europe and their former colonies, persistent corruption is sometimes cited as a primary cause of economic backwardness and ineffective government in these regions.Footnote ⁹ Historians have devoted more attention to non-European territories than to the metropolises; however, chronology in these spaces does not differ much from their European counterparts. In the case of Spanish America, the transformation of the perceptions of corruption have been related to the reforms introduced by the Bourbon dynasty in the second half of the eighteenth century to streamline the royal offices in the colonies. Authors such as McFarlane thought that corruption was inherent to Spanish colonial societies and argued that Bourbon reforms did not manage to eradicate clientelism and corruption.Footnote ¹⁰ More recent studies have revisited corruption from different angles. Historians such as Yun Casalilla, Ponce Leiva, and Andújar Castillo present changes in the perceptions of corruption in a more complex fashion and relate those transformations to the evolution of the Spanish empire; they confirm that change occurred from the mid-eighteenth century onwards.Footnote ¹¹ According to Rosenmüller, transformations started long before that date in the sphere of justice, around 1650, and extended to other realms of government from 1750 onwards.Footnote ¹² Unfortunately, case-studies for south-western European territories are still scarce.Footnote ¹³ In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, abuses and corruption were used to justify the introduction of reforms but, if those reforms failed, corruption was invoked to explain the fiascos, thus contributing to characterizing these regions as inherently and irremediably corrupt.Footnote ¹⁴ Some scholars still defend positions similar to these views, linking weak state power to an allegedly late and ultimately failed transition from pre-modern to modern forms of corruption and anticorruption.Footnote ¹⁵

This article examines the link between changing perceptions of corrupt practices and political transformations in eighteenth-century south-western Europe. For working purposes, it adopts the classical definition of corruption: namely, the use of a political role – in this study, primarily municipal offices – for private benefit at the expense of the common good. Notably, in the cases discussed here, illicit, illegal, and/or immoral behaviours and actions were not labelled as ‘corruption’ but instead as ‘abuse’, ‘fraud’, ‘excess’, or ‘bad government’, among other terms.Footnote ¹⁶ Arguably, the differentiation between public and private spheres existed before the eighteenth century, so the primary change was not a clearer separation of these spheres. Moreover, in most cases, political practices did not begin to change until the latter half of the eighteenth century. What shifted, instead, was the moral and legal evaluation of certain practices, which started to be perceived as corrupt at some point during the century. This shift was often linked to local political conflicts, which were particularly frequent and intense during the central decades of the century.Footnote ¹⁷

This text analyses how actors in various centres of power perceived and defined corrupt behaviours and actions, and how they weaponized accusations of abuse and fraud in their disputes. While perceptions of corruption and political practices changed concurrently within a context of political agitation, the connection between transformations in these areas was neither linear, nor unidirectional, nor simplistic, as has sometimes been argued. The main objective of this article is precisely to clarify the elusive causal links between these phenomena and to explore whether there was a break in pre-modern political organizations that corresponded to changing views of corruption: a ‘corrupture’.

To trace and analyse those links between changing perceptions of corrupt practices and political reform, four local case-studies are examined, namely Cagliari (Sardinia), Ciutadella (Minorca), Tarragona (Catalonia), and Huesca (Aragon). Historically, they all belonged to the crown of Aragon, one of the constituents of the Hispanic monarchy, and presented remarkable similarities. They have been selected for that very reason: to observe the evolution of different variations of the same phenomenon across time in four case-studies that departed from a common institutional matrix. Comparison between cases may reveal local specificities due to peculiar arrangements, but also broader common trends.

Some of the archival sources of these case-studies are quite different from those typically used by historians of corruption – namely trials, treatises, and records of inspections carried out by royal officers (among them residencias, visitas, and pesquisas). Here, minutes, correspondence, memoranda, pamphlets, reports, and budgets are used to reconstruct how the perception of certain practices changed over the course of the eighteenth century. These sources were produced by royal officers and judges, but also by local authorities, members of urban guilds, municipal creditors, common people, and anonymous libellers – in short, by a myriad of diverse actors who became involved in local conflicts and defined what should be considered corrupt and what should not, thereby contributing to the transformation of their polities.Footnote ¹⁸ The article is structured into six sections. Following this introduction, each case-study is analysed in a separate section. The final one is dedicated to comparing the cases and drawing conclusions.

II

The first case-study is set in Cagliari, the capital of the kingdom of Sardinia, which, from 1720, was under the dominion of the Savoy dynasty. It is an example of how the abusive conducts of an officer triggered reforms. In Cagliari, the municipal officer in charge of ensuring an adequate supply of food by supervising the prices and sale of groceries and other goods, as well as overseeing weights and measures used in commercial transactions, was the amostassen or almotacén. This officer obtained a part of his salary from fees and the fines he imposed on those who contravened the rules, which were annually updated and promulgated by the town council through an edict or pregón. In fact, the amostassen was appointed by the municipal councillors every year. The office dated back to the medieval period, at the time of the Aragonese conquest of the island. Although it experienced some changes throughout the late medieval and early modern periods, in essence it remained unchanged until the mid-eighteenth century.

The amostassen played a key role in the municipal treasury of Cagliari, as transactions and security depended on him.Footnote ¹⁹ The Sardinian parliament of 1632 settled the fees and fines that the amostassen could charge. They were confirmed by viceroys in 1683 and 1714, but in the mid-eighteenth century the officers were accused of charging excessive fees for personal profit: ‘They have deviated from the aforementioned orders and have advanced to appropriate new fees over various kinds of provisions not included in those already established, or even expressly prohibited, in the collection of which they are still persevering.’ These were the words of the pregón (edict) promulgated by Viceroy Conte della Trinità in 1756 to regulate the office. To remediate the ‘complaints of the public, which finds itself aggrieved due to numerous abuses’, new norms for the office of amostassen were dictated. Unlike previous reforms, which regulated fees and fines only, the new rules settled the limits of the office regarding the inspection of groceries and other products, established fines for the amostassen and his lieutenant in case they contravened the norms, and identified the regente of the Sardinian Reale Udienza (royal high court) as the judge to whom sellers and consumers could resort in case of grievance.Footnote ²⁰

The abuses committed by the successive officials were a perfect excuse for the viceroy and the royal officers in the Sardinian capital to reform the office of amostassen and to further intervene in municipal affairs. Those changes directly affected the town councillors, who were supposed to freely manage the treasury of Cagliari and to judge any violation of the norms for the sale of products. Now, by virtue of the new pregón, they were not the only authority with capacity to decide on the fines and interventions of the amostassen. Furthermore, the viceroy had to approve any pregón that established the fees and fines that the officer could charge before the town councillors published it.

The municipal corporation was radically against the pregón, so the town councillors sent a memorandum to the viceroy in which they contested the new regulation. They argued that, when they took office, they had sworn to defend the privileges and charters granted by the Aragonese and Hispanic monarchs to the municipality of Cagliari. The councillors cited medieval and early modern privileges that gave the amostassen the prerogative of managing the supply of groceries and other goods, and the power to invigilate the measures and weights. Those were exclusive prerogatives of the amostassen, who could not be judged by anybody except for the councillors. Those who felt aggrieved about the ‘abusive fees’ (‘derechos abusivos’) of the amostassen had to resort to the councillors. The latter had never acted with ‘harmful dissimulation or notorious negligence’, but the pregón that altered the office of amostassen would be misinterpreted by ‘the populace … undoubtedly indicating little satisfaction with the town council, and making it suspicious in its provisions and orders’.

In February 1757, the viceroy responded that the pregón did not violate the privileges of Cagliari, so it should remain in force.Footnote ²¹ Yet the town councillors did not accept the order of the viceroy and sent another memorandum to the king. In a letter to the monarch dated April 1757, Viceroy Conte della Trinità explained that the town councillors were ‘unsatisfied with certain provisions contained in the abovementioned last pregón aimed at uprooting abuses and undue exactions’.Footnote ²² Three months later, he said that the councillors ‘precisely target despotism, which they call by the synonym of independence’. The viceroy thought that the councillors’ reluctance to accept the pregón ‘makes the public whisper in discredit of the government, and leads the town council itself to presume that the viceroy does not have the authority to enforce this necessary publication’.Footnote ²³

Although the town councillors initially rejected the pregón, arguing that they had received no answer to the memorandum that they had submitted to the court of Turin, they eventually accepted the edict in late August, when the viceroy read it aloud and the king rejected their supplication.Footnote ²⁴ The practice of the amostassen charging the fees and fines determined by the town council was therefore transformed due to the accusations of abuses against the municipal officer and the councillors. The prerogative to fix and collect the fees and fines was no longer exclusive to the municipal corporation and its officers, and the activities of the amostassen started to be supervised by the viceroy and other royal officers, and were transformed according to the latter’s principles and views.Footnote ²⁵

Yet the office of amostassen was not the only game in town. From the 1750s, the management of the municipality and treasury of Cagliari – just as those of the other Sardinian royal towns – was under revision. The purse of the capital was ruled by the town councillors, who were supervised by two representatives of the creditors. They followed the regulations and budget promulgated by Viceroy Saint-Rémy in the 1720s.Footnote ²⁶ However, from the mid-eighteenth century, the councillors of Cagliari and the other royal towns started to be accused of committing ‘many abuses’ (‘tanti abusi’). Successive viceroys and other royal officers considered that the mismanagement of the municipal treasuries was a consequence of the system of election of the councillors and other municipal officers, namely the ancient Aragonese sortition through bags (insaculación).Footnote ²⁷ Describing the case of Sassari’s town councillors, Viceroy des Hayes told the segretario di stato Bogino:

Viceroy des Hayes argued that town councillors were mainly concerned about being elected, because holding a municipal office could profit them and/or their friends at the expense of the local treasury. Municipal councillors defended their practices, resorting to privileges and tradition, but royal officers insisted that those practices were abusive and harmful, to justify the necessity of reforms. There was a fight between town councillors and royal authorities to define the licit character of the actions and behaviour of the former. In the abovementioned letter, the Sardinian viceroy informed Bogino that town councillors paid attention ‘only to irrelevant issues, and focus solely on disobey the government’s orders’, and he concluded his description by arguing:

Town councillors found offensive the terms that the viceroy employed. They considered that the traditional practices they performed were not abusive but just. Since they were based on medieval privileges, they were legitimate and therefore had to be respected and maintained. Yet royal ministers and officers had different views: they thought that municipal officers and councillors took advantage of their offices to benefit themselves, their relatives, and their friends. Reforms were conducted on the basis of those new views of abusive conducts. Put differently, the change in the perception of corruption occurred before the reforms and can be causally connected to them. The successive viceroys and other royal officers and judges tried to eradicate behaviours and practices that used to be normal but that, from the mid-eighteenth century, were no longer acceptable to the inhabitants of the Sardinian towns, the creditors of the municipalities, and, above all, the royal officers themselves. In Cagliari, as in the other royal towns of the kingdom of Sardinia, the system to elect the councillors and the management of the treasury were reformed in the 1750s and 1760s. Everything was triggered by a change in the perception of the practices of the amostassen first and of the town councillors later.Footnote ³⁰

III

Minorca was ceded to the British crown after the signing of the peace of Utrecht (1715). Although the islanders managed to preserve the Catholic religion and their institutions and privileges, the status of Minorca changed significantly. The island, and especially the town of Maó, became an important commercial and military base for the British. In fact, Minorca was often treated as a bargaining chip between European powers, namely the British, the French, and, to a lesser extent, the Spanish monarchies.Footnote ³¹ The new status of the island after 1715 implied changes in practices across different spheres, ranging from politics to taxation, and including municipal governance, trade norms, and religion. The transformation of practices was accompanied by changes in the perception of the legality and morality of certain actions. Those changes were shaped through conflicts between the councillors of the Menorcan municipalities, the so-called jurats, and the British authorities. After the death of Colonel Richard Kane, lieutenant-governor of Minorca, in 1736, his successors were accused of committing all kinds of abuses: enriching themselves by appropriating taxes, imposing arbitrary fines, falsifying accounts, creating monopolies, not consulting the jurats about the governance of the island, intercepting the letters from the Menorcan representatives in London, and other reprehensible conduct.Footnote ³²

In 1748, the privy council found Governor General Antrusther guilty of acting tyrannically in Minorca, so, in 1752, the council issued a regulation that reduced the competencies of the governor and granted wide powers to the jurats. Antrusther’s successor, Lieutenant-General Blakeney, accused the Menorcan authorities of committing fraud by abusing their new powers, thereby damaging the British interests on the island. In 1753, the privy council revoked the regulation issued one year earlier and gave more power to the governor again. The Menorcan authorities protested against the new regulation, but it was maintained until the French invasion of the island in 1756.Footnote ³³ As in the first British occupation of Minorca, the main concern of the islanders during the seven years that the island remained under French dominion was preserving their privileges. Intendant Causan considered that the cause of the decline of the island was the mismanagement of the municipal treasuries, the incapacity of the jurats, and the privileges they constantly invoked to preserve their power. The new political practices developed after 1715 meant the emergence of new perceptions of abuse and corruption, both on the part of the British and French occupiers and also among the native population and authorities, who continuously clashed over municipal governance, privileges, and taxation.Footnote ³⁴

The return of the British in 1763 meant the reimposition of the norms promulgated by the privy council a decade earlier. The new lieutenant-governor, Colonel James Johnston, proved as tactless and autocratic as most of his predecessors. As early as May 1764, he was recalled to London, to respond to the accusations filed by the jurats against him before the privy council. When he returned to the island one year later, a pamphlet against him was published, probably by Joan Pons i Andreu, the Menorcan syndic in London, who presented several memoranda before and after Johnston’s tenure. The pamphlet accused the British governor of seizing tax revenue ‘for his own purposes’, violating the Menorcan privileges, confirmed by the king in 1764, and enriching himself

The pamphlet criticized Johnston for appointing Francesc Seguí as his adviser. Seguí had served the French and was therefore suspected of not being loyal to the British crown. The anonymous author argued that the islanders could only achieve ‘happiness’ under the rule of the British monarch and through the preservation of the native privileges, ‘for they are to be treated as a free people’ and not ‘like slaves under the present commander’. The pamphlet concluded that Johnston acted ‘chiefly at his own interest and the making of money’, being a ‘bad governor’ who had committed ‘severities even beyond the other two’ governors who preceded him in office.Footnote ³⁶ Eventually, in 1770, the privy council exonerated Johnston from almost all charges. The councillors dismissed the accusations of the Menorcan authorities as ‘frivolous and vexatious’ and considered that the governor had not behaved in a corrupt manner, but that he had exceeded his powers.Footnote ³⁷

The case of Johnston is interesting not just because of the accusations of misbehaviour, but because of the reply to the Menorcan authorities written by Johnston’s secretary, Edward Clarke.Footnote ³⁸ From the very moment that Britons arrived on the island, they showed animus towards the islanders and perplexity because of the latter’s obstinacy to renounce their privileges and embrace the British laws, ‘the mildest Constitution of Government upon Earth’, in the words of the engineer John Armstrong. Governor Blakeney thought that the jurats of the Menorcan towns would ‘shake off, if they can, all obedience and subjection to His Majesty, and … make themselves independent and despotick here’. Baron Tyrawley distrusted the islanders, as they were not ‘faithful subjects and it is the business of the Governor to make them behave as such’.Footnote ³⁹ Johnston’s secretary was also very critical of the state of the island and put the blame on the Menorcan jurats. In his defence of the lieutenant-governor, Clarke said that accusations against him had been provoked by ‘petulant and malicious humour of an insignificant party, who would probably starve but for the cabals of their own making’. Clarke thought that jurats ‘conceal the many petty-fogging chicaneries’ against Johnston, and later presented them ‘in the most glaring colours’. He argued that the governor sought ‘public good’, so he ‘ought to take place of the private interest of jurats and their connexions’. And he believed that the Menorcan authorities were not trustworthy:

Clarke mixed ideas about the unreliability of the Menorcan authorities, their incapacity to exercise government, and their personal interests in holding the island offices to get (illicit) profit from them. Except for direct accusations of corruption, those ideas had been present on Minorca from the arrival of the British; however, Clarke presented them in a rather disorganized but quite explicit way to be more convincing in his defence of Lieutenant-Governor Johnston. The secretary emphasized more than once the incapacity of the islanders to rule themselves properly, stating that ‘the majority of them are entirely unacquainted with the world, without education, narrow in their circumstances, and clogged with numbers of indigent relations’. He also compared Minorca with England:

Clarke denounced the jurats for the ‘irregularity of their behaviour’; addressing them, he argued: ‘so far your state is deplorable indeed; but it is purely to be ascribed to your own misconduct’. Since the islanders were incapable of governing themselves properly, he thought that the power of the governor had to be augmented through stricter regulations, ‘because he everyday sees abuses, which he cannot rectify’. The Englishman considered the inhabitants of Minorca ‘poor, ignorant creatures, who have neither will nor understanding of their own, but are conducted, as in leading-strings, by artful attornies’, and concluded his defence of Johnston by attacking the Menorcan authorities again:

Clarke’s arguments about the unreliability and incapacity of the Menorcan authorities were not new, but accusations of corruption had never been so explicit. By linking these long-standing criticisms to the ‘abuses’ and ‘misconduct’ of the jurats, he contributed to the debates about the form of government of Minorca. Projects to alter the ancient municipal councils had been put forward by foreign and native actors, but it was not until the 1770s that those concerns reached the town councils. British authorities put pressure on the municipalities to alter the ancient government. In Ciutadella, the former capital of the island, the town councillors recognized that annual renewal of offices was harmful to the town, ‘due to the many expenses caused to our municipality by the annual change, as well as the little practice gained by officeholders within the term of one year’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Some councillors who belonged to the Menorcan nobility took a step further and proposed to exclude craftsmen and farmers from being town councillors. They argued that, ‘being illiterate, they lack the necessary knowledge to handle public affairs’. The non-noble, citizen councillors rejected the proposal, arguing that good councillors had to be ‘expert, careful, economical, frugal, and honest’. By excluding craftsmen and farmers from municipal offices, ‘the Democratic and the Aristocratic government would be confounded’, thus losing ‘the interesting and delicate point of balance’ between social classes. They proposed other changes in the management of the municipalities, such as longer tenures and different methods to elect the officers.Footnote ⁴¹ It is worth noticing that no project accused the councillors of comporting themselves corruptly.

Almost everyone on Minorca recognized that changes were necessary, but reforms were introduced neither during the second British occupation nor after the Spanish conquest of the island in 1782. Francesc Seguí, the attorney who had collaborated with the French occupiers and Johnston in putting forward plans to reform the government of Minorca, once again proposed changes for the island. He wondered how some municipal councillors – illiterate individuals ‘who only have natural understanding and discernment’ – could ‘accomplish and execute what they ignore’.Footnote ⁴² The reform was eventually implemented in 1799, during the third British occupation. Governor Stuart altered the method of election, reducing the number of councillors in every town and establishing prerequisites for appointment. Unlike Ciutadella’s noblemen or the attorney Seguí, Stuart harshly criticized the political action of the Menorcan jurats, which he saw as ‘arbitrary, partial and secret … highly prejudicial to the Interest of the Country’. There was no fierce resistance to the reform, but general resignation towards a change that was considered inevitable.Footnote ⁴³

Minorca thus experienced changes in political practices from the early eighteenth century, a transformation that ran parallel to changes in perceptions of what was considered abusive. Menorcans used accusations of corruption against the governors to preserve their prerogatives vis-à-vis the British occupiers, who constantly invoked the untrustworthiness of the islanders to defend the necessity of reforms. Mutual attacks peaked in the 1750s and 1760s. Even though British authorities had usually pointed out the incapacity and unreliability of the Menorcan jurats, only Clarke dared to accuse them of having personal interests in keeping their rule over the municipalities and rejecting the regulation of 1753. Clarke’s arguments fed the debates about the form of government and the aptitude of the Menorcans to hold offices, but nobody repeated his accusations of corruption against the jurats. Thus, the reform of 1799 cannot be directly linked to the accusations made by Johnston’s secretary.

IV

Throughout the early modern period, the Catalan municipality of Tarragona frequently went through difficult financial situations. The municipal treasury came under the control of creditors for certain periods, but the town councillors managed it in the first half of the eighteenth century. During that time, the aldermen spent considerable amounts of municipal funds to pay for feasts, gratuities to municipal officers (usually as rewards for their work), and extraordinary celebrations.Footnote ⁴⁴ Both regular and extraordinary expenses were justified by invoking immemorial custom and the usual practice. A specific item of expenditure illustrates the transformation of the perception of illicit, immoral, and/or abusive behaviours, namely the present that the municipality gave to the royal authorities in Tarragona, as well as the town councillors and officers, for Christmas. The present consisted of capons, partridges, turkeys, and turrón. The town council approved it in 1758 as follows:

Because the practice had been performed since time immemorial, it was seen as something licit. However, in the 1750s conflicts arose and the practice started to be questioned. The aldermen of Tarragona clashed with the municipal creditors and the guilds of the city over debt service, taxation, and expenditure. Creditors and guilds accused the aldermen of mismanaging the municipal treasury, squandering money in superfluous expenses, charging excessive taxes, and not servicing debt. The town councillors and the accusers failed to reach consensus and, after a long suit, the Consejo de Castilla transferred the control of the municipal treasury to the creditors and the guilds, who would manage the municipal funds according to a budget they had proposed. In December 1759, the representatives of the debtholders and the guilds resolved

The present was eventually given, but halved.Footnote ⁴⁷ A few months later, the aldermen reacted to the accusations of the guilds and the creditors, and tried to regain control over the municipal treasury. In a long memorandum submitted to the king, they defended their management of the municipal funds and their reputation, and accused the guilds and the creditors of falsifying the accounts they used in the lawsuit to gain control of the municipal purse. They justified the necessity of collecting taxes as they used to do and invoked immemorial custom to justify the expenses that had been cut by the new managers of the treasury. The aldermen devoted several lines to the Christmas present:

The guilds reacted by printing a reply in which they, too, invoked royal orders to defend their management of the treasury and the pertinence of cutting expenses and gratuities that they saw as superfluous. The reply said:

The creditors also defended the changes in the practice of giving the present, explaining that the prices of capons, partridges, and turkeys in Tarragona in the Christmas season were not as high as the town councillors said, and arguing that 50 libras were more than enough to fund a present that would be ‘more brilliant than the one the archbishop gives to the cathedral chapter for Easter’.Footnote ⁵⁰

The disputes about the Christmas present and other expenses and taxes was settled in 1763, when the Contaduría General de Propios y Arbitrios (general account office for municipal treasuries) issued a budget (‘reglamento de dotación’) that regulated income and expenditure of Tarragona’s municipality. The Christmas present was one of the items excluded from the budget. It was suppressed on the grounds that it was ‘noxious’ (viciosa), since all the receivers of the present had their corresponding salaries.Footnote ⁵¹

It is difficult – maybe impossible – to directly connect the disputes around the Christmas present to the exclusion of the item from the budget. The Contaduría General suppressed similar items in budgets and regulations of many other municipalities, with a view to reducing expenses and streamlining the management of the treasuries. Every year, the high officer reported to the king on the elaboration of regulations and budgets. He repeatedly argued that, by tackling abuses and frauds through the suppression of superfluous expenses, municipalities were saving millions of reales every year. In a letter to the intendant of Valencia, King Carlos III ordered him to inform the king ‘if the regulations for all the towns have already been established …, eliminating all superfluous expenses, as this is the most important point to prevent the misappropriation of public funds’.Footnote ⁵² Superfluous expenses were criticized both by local actors, generally opposed to the municipal corporations, and by royal officers, but the link between attacks on those expenses and their suppression or reduction in the budgets elaborated from 1760 is not straightforward. In any case, it is worth noticing again that the reform was to a large extent provoked by a myriad of local conflicts about the management of the treasuries, in which the morality of some expenses was widely discussed.

The case of Tarragona proves that the legal and moral consideration of some practices changed in the mid-eighteenth century. The Christmas present was not questioned until the outbreak of the conflicts between the town councillors on the one hand and the guilds and creditors on the other. The latter changed their views of the practice and used it as a political weapon against the aldermen to gain ascendancy over the management of the treasury. Even if the eventual suppression of the present cannot be directly connected to the disputes in this particular case, the general context of conflict in the Spanish monarchy contributed to the exclusion from municipal budgets of expenses that had started to be considered superfluous, such as the Tarragona Christmas present. The connection between reform and perception changes existed, but it was far more complex than just cause and effect: the licit character of the present was questioned before the reform, during the conflicts that led to altering the management of municipal funds, and after the reform, to justify the necessity and effectiveness of the regulations designed by the general account office. In a sense, changes in the moral consideration of the Christmas present shaped the reform but, vice versa, the reform also changed the perception and status of the practice of the gift, among many others, which had been seen as acceptable until then, but as superfluous and hence abusive or fraudulent from the 1760s onwards.

V

In the Aragonese city of Huesca, the gardens, vineyards, and fields were overseen by guards appointed by the town council. In 1680, these guards, who received a regular salary, were chosen by lot from among the local farmers. However, in 1699 the custody started to be leased: that is, it was auctioned, so the best bidder paid an amount to the town council and appointed guards to fine those who introduced their herds in the vineyards and fields. Since the salaries of the guards and the profit of the leaseholder came from the fines imposed by the guards (they received one third of the fines), they had incentives to thoroughly watch the vineyards and gardens, at least on paper.Footnote ⁵³ Leasing was initially controlled by the town council, and, from 1721, by the assembly of creditors that ruled the municipality of Huesca.Footnote ⁵⁴

There was no complaint about the leasing of the custody until the 1750s, when local actors started denouncing what they saw as abuses committed by the guards. As in the other case-studies, during the central decades of the eighteenth century the municipality was going through a turbulent period. Aldermen, creditors, and other local actors got involved in conflicts regarding the management of the municipal treasury, conflicts in which accusations of embezzlement, fraud, and mismanagement were used as political weapons. The town council lost control of the municipal purse, which was transferred to a junta de propios in which creditors were in a majority. The conflicts between the two bodies were constant, but the custody of the fields was a minor issue within those disputes. The junta suggested that, instead of leasing the custody, the town council could appoint guards, but the municipal corporation rejected the proposal, as the aldermen considered that the guards would not be accountable if there was no leasing contract.Footnote ⁵⁵ The practice of leasing the custody persisted, and only in the late 1750s did it become a marginal object of a dispute between the town council and the newly constituted junta de propios.

The custody was the subject of investigation during the juicio de residencia conducted on the town council of Huesca in 1758. A juicio de residencia was an inspection carried out by an incoming official who examined the behaviour of municipal authorities and servants prior to taking office.Footnote ⁵⁶ In this case, the officer asked several witnesses whether they recognized that the guards had fulfilled their duties – custody of the fields, vineyards, and gardens of Huesca – or, on the contrary, whether they knew that

Witnesses gave diverse answers. Only a few thought that the guards fulfilled their duties. Others were aware that the guards were assigned to oversee the custody of fields and gardens but held no opinion regarding their activities. Most witnesses said that they had heard that the guards paid for the privilege of holding their office and that, instead of fining infringers, they accepted payments from those infringers to introduce their herds in the gardens and fields of Huesca. Many witnesses protested against leasing. They argued that guards should be paid for servicing instead of paying for the office themselves. Several witnesses thought that, in the past, they had been paid by the municipality for custody, but that the practice had changed; an apothecary even argued that the change had been introduced recently. Several witnesses explained that the ‘common opinion’ was that the guards could not fulfil their obligations if they were paying for servicing. Many witnesses shared the opinion that guards were poor (pobres), lazy (guitones), and vagabond (vagamundos), and had neither work nor property (‘no tienen ni oficio ni hacienda’). A farmer said he had suffered ‘damage’ caused by the guards, who were not held accountable, and a noble landholder protested angrily against the ‘frauds and excesses’ committed by the guards. The officer who conducted the residencia absolved the aldermen of the charge of tolerating the abuses of the guards, as they argued that, since the custody was leased, the responsibility belonged to the junta that managed the treasury. Yet the officer did not condemn the junta de propios either.Footnote ⁵⁸

In 1761, the junta leased the custody of the gardens and fields again, but forced the leaseholder to dismiss two former guards who had been explicitly excluded by the members of the junta in the leasing contract.Footnote ⁵⁹ A few years later, the Real Audiencia, the highest court in the kingdom of Aragon, ordered a judge who had conducted another juicio de residencia to report on the practice of leasing the custody of gardens and fields. The officer considered that the change introduced in the late seventeenth century to lease the custody had been ‘a pure invention of the greed of those ancient town councillors who introduced it to increase the revenues of the City’. Prior to implementing leasing, the town councillors appointed honourable farmers to watch the gardens and fields; after 1699, when leasing was introduced, guards were ‘day labourers and destitute, unhappy individuals, and generally those with a poor reputation’. He confirmed the abuses committed by the guards, who agreed upon the fines with the contraveners, and explained that the practice existed in other Aragonese towns and villages. The judge thought that guards should be appointed by the town council and their salaries paid by the farmers; however, the practice could not be changed because it had recently been ratified by the intendant and the Contaduría General de Propios y Arbitrios.Footnote ⁶⁰ In fact, the custody of the fields and gardens continued to be leased in the 1760s and 1770s. In 1775, the intendant resolved that, instead of being auctioned annually, the custody had to be leased for three years.Footnote ⁶¹

The abuses of the guards persisted, so the owners of gardens, fields, and vineyards resorted to the Consejo de Castilla in 1781.Footnote ⁶² The landholders accused the guards of coming to an agreement with the livestock owners to allow them to bring their herds into the fields without being fined, thus damaging the estates of the farmers and the municipal treasury, as the town’s fields were also affected by the fraud. The petitioners argued that the practice of leasing the custody had recently been introduced by the junta de propios and criticized the guards harshly, describing them as ‘the most incapable subjects of the populace, … those who lack another industry to ensure their subsistence’. The owners of gardens and vineyards accused the guards of

To tackle the abuses, farmers put forward the creation of a junta that would appoint the guards and pay their salaries by imposing a tax on wine.

Before making a decision, the Consejo de Castilla ordered its fiscal to report on this issue. He dismissed the argument that the practice of leasing had recently been introduced by the junta de propios, and reminded the petitioners that, by virtue of royal orders, all the branches of the municipal treasury had to be leased to avoid fraud and abuses.Footnote ⁶³ The fiscal agreed, however, that guards damaged the municipality and the inhabitants of Huesca by committing ‘several excesses and failing to comply with the legality and integrity of their position’. He thought that the solution of creating a specific junta to manage the custody was not convenient, as it would concentrate too much power. The fiscal requested the town council and the junta de propios to send reports on the custody. The municipal corporation confirmed the accusations against the guards, who ‘allowed themselves to be corrupted by money, as usually leaseholders are the vilest individuals, … unsuited for work …, idle and lazy’. The aldermen explained that the custody had been leased annually until 1777, when it started to be leased for three years. Since guards did not fine contraveners, the town councillors thought that the creation of a junta that appointed guards and paid their salaries was the best option. The junta de propios reported that, from its creation in 1754, they continued leasing the custody as the town council used to do. In 1778, they started leasing it for three years by order of the intendant. The members of the junta de propios confirmed the abuses of the guards, but saw the creation of another junta that controlled the custody as dangerous, as nobody would bid for the leasing.

In his verdict, the fiscal concluded that creating a new junta to manage the custody would be harmful. However, he recommended that the Consejo de Castilla should order the junta de propios to lease the custody to an owner of fields or gardens, surrogating the appointment of guards in favour of the leaseholder. The supreme council accepted the verdict of the fiscal.

The junta de propios obeyed and leased the custody to the owners of vineyards and gardens. Yet in 1787, following the general instructions for the municipal treasuries, the junta leased the custody to the highest bidder for three years.Footnote ⁶⁴ Huesca’s landholders would not react until 1801, when they resorted to the Consejo de Castilla again, using the same arguments: guards were corrupt, lazy, and poor, and abused their offices to profit themselves. The Aragonese Real Audiencia was ordered to report on the issue. The judges agreed that abuses were harmful, and they gave the example of Saragossa, where landholders appointed their guards. Huesca’s method was a ‘custom, and voluntary application’, so it ‘should not serve as an obstacle to changing the method of custody’. The Consejo de Castilla would not make a decision until 1808, when it reissued the orders of 1784.Footnote ⁶⁵

Changes in both the perception and the practice of leasing the custody of the fields of Huesca were only indirectly related to reform. Moral considerations about the practice shifted while the management of the municipal treasury was being discussed, but there is no obvious link between the two processes; they ran parallel, but hardly any actor related them to each other. Once the general reform of the municipal treasuries was implemented, almost nobody used the abuses committed by the leaseholders and the guards to attack their political rivals. There was broad consensus that leasing had to be abolished or reformed, but, despite the efforts of some landholders from Huesca and the support of the municipal bodies and royal officers, it was not altered. The logics of the new administrative structure and the general norms for the management of the treasuries prevailed over the ad hoc solution proposed by the local actors and approved by the Consejo de Castilla. Paradoxically, the reform prevented a practice which had begun to be seen as corrupt from being transformed or eradicated.

VI

Edward Clarke’s argument echoes some of the contributions of this article to the historiography on corruption and political reform. The words of Governor Johnston’s secretary reveal that, by the mid-eighteenth century, actors were already making a clear difference between public and private spheres, and that they attributed the interference of private interests in collective affairs through offices and roles to malice, insolence, and deception. The quotation further suggests that it was practices and behaviours themselves which carried moral implications, and that the transformation of those practices was linked to a shift in how they were perceived.

This article has shown that, within the context of local conflicts, actors transformed both their assessment of practices and, in some cases, the practices themselves. Yet, simultaneity or proximity in time does not necessarily imply causality. For centuries, philosophers and scholars have warned about the fallacies of establishing causal links between phenomena that occur close together in time. When it comes to examining corruption and reform, social scientists often draw a straightforward correlation between the two: reforms are designed and implemented to tackle corruption, so corruption causes reform. Traditionally, especially in the case of south-western European regions, scholars have assumed this narrative, which typically aligns with the views of reformers who invoked corruption to justify their policies, and, if reforms failed, to explain their failure.

Drawing on recent historiographical works, this article has demonstrated that perceptions of corrupt, abusive, and fraudulent practices changed throughout the eighteenth century; however, those transformations were sinuous. Actors redefined corruption in the framework of the conflicts they were involved in. It is no coincidence that conflicts intensified and changes accelerated around the central decades of the mid-eighteenth century, when the transition between pre-modern polities and modern states began. From that point onward, reforms were implemented, although rhythms varied across cases. It is crucial to identify the timing of the reforms and the shifts in the perception of practices to establish causal links between them. In all the case-studies except that of Huesca, perceptions of the immoral character of some practices shifted before political reform took place. However, in all cases except Minorca, views of corruption continued to evolve as reforms were implemented. Finally, the cases of Tarragona and Huesca show that the moral and/or legal evaluation of some practices was redefined after reforms had been executed.

The sequence of events is important (though not determinative) in establishing causal links between reform and changing perceptions of corruption, as well as in defining their direction. Cagliari provides the most straightforward case: the abuses committed by the amostassen presented an opportunity for the royal officers to discredit the town councillors, their practices, and the procedure by which they were elected. New evaluations of old practices gave way to reforms. Yet the other case-studies invite caution. Clarke’s counter-attack to defend Johnston reinforced British prejudices regarding the loyalty and capacity of the Menorcans, and probably fuelled the debates about the necessity of altering the governance of the island; however, neither locals nor British repeated Clarke’s accusations of corruption against the Menorcan jurats, and the link between the reforms of 1799 and the accusations is indirect. In Tarragona, changes in the perception of the morality of some practices led to the reforms of the 1750s and, together with similar changes in hundreds of municipalities across the Spanish monarchy, boosted the general reform of the municipal treasuries that began in 1760. Nevertheless, the reverse process can also be observed: royal officers and even municipal actors identified superfluous expenses as one of the main sources of corruption once the reforms were already in place, using this to argue in favour of changes. In other words, reformers redefined abuses and corruption a posteriori to justify and consolidate the reforms. The case of Huesca is even more extreme, as there is no obvious connection between local conflicts, changes in the perception of corruption, and reforms; moreover, practices that began to seem abusive could not be eradicated precisely because of the reform and its logics.

‘Corrupture’ occurred in the eighteenth century, but, as recent historiography highlights, it was neither linear nor unidirectional. Perceptions of abusive practices changed and, in some cases, these transformations led to a break between two political worlds. Future studies will need to determine whether processes like these ones – where old practices were criticized and changed while the underlying logics of corruption remained unchanged – occurred in the medieval and early modern periods. Arguably, the eighteenth-century shift in views of corrupt practices was distinct from earlier transformations. While the nature of local conflicts was not fundamentally different from those of the past, their resolution was singular. In light of the collapse of ancient practices and mechanisms that once shaped social life, actors had to devise, bargain, and implement new political practices. New views of corruption were used as a weapon within that context of conflict and negotiation. It is precisely the context that makes the eighteenth century different from earlier periods.

Be that as it may, differences between case-studies should not overshadow the common trends in how political practices and their moral evaluations transformed over time. This article has brought together case-studies whose evolution and chronology are consistent with other European experiences. Arguably, south-western European polities – and likely their overseas colonies – mirrored developments seen in other regions of the ‘Old Continent’ and beyond. This invites scholars to reconsider simplistic connections between endemic corruption and failed transition to the modern world outside north-western Europe. In fact, Clarke’s quotation echoes this question too. By setting the colonial West Indies as a foil for Minorca and its traditional municipal regime, he situates the reader before the gestation of enduring ideas about corruption, backwardness, and modernity in south-western Europe.Footnote ⁶⁷ Historians are tracing similarities and differences between territories, stressing the importance of the circumstances and contexts in which transformations of the notions and views of corruption took place. While this research holds great promise, it is crucial for historians to remain mindful of the broader global and imperial realities within which local conflicts unfolded, to challenge deeply rooted ideas that connect corruption, state performance, and development. History can offer meaningful insights into the present only when scholars acknowledge and respect the complexities and otherness of the past.