Modernity's Corruption

Nicholas Hoover Wilson develops a new account of the changing category of corruption by examining the English East India Company and its transformation from a largely commercial enterprise to a militarized offshoot of British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Nicholas Hoover Wilson is associate professor of sociology at Stony Brook University.

Steve Pincus, author of 1688: The First Modern Revolution:
Modernity's Corruption is model work of historical sociology. Wilson asks a wonderfully rich and puzzling question: Why were notions of corruption transformed from situational ones to more abstract and universal concepts? By focusing on the case of England's East India Company in the late eighteenth century, Wilson advances the claim that the transformation had everything to do with imperial governance, and the fact that ruling at a distance necessitated the implementation of more abstract and political economic standards. What makes Wilson's work so compelling is that these broad theoretical claims, claims that have implications for how we understand the development of moral claims more generally, are so carefully situated in a deep engagement with the archival and pamphlet literature of the era. Empire, in Wilson's hands, becomes a central engine of modernity.

Mark Knights, author of Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire, 1600-1850:
This book will generate a good deal of interest from historians as well as sociologists. It offers a perceptive study of the East India Company when it was frequently under fire for corruption. It persuasively argues that shock at self-interested behavior helped to promote a more 'modern,' public duty-centered ideal for officials.

Philip Gorski, Frederick and Laura Goff Professor, Yale University:
What is 'corruption'? And what does it have to do with 'modernity'? In this carefully constructed and rigorously argued new book, Nicholas Hoover Wilson traces the historical genesis of modern-day understandings to internecine battles within the shapeshifting architectures of the British East India Company. An exemplary work of social science history.

Bruce G. Carruthers, author of The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power, and Credit in America:
This welcome study of corruption reflects on fundamental distinctions between public and private, abstract and particular, and on how standards of appropriateness emerge. Wilson grounds his analysis in careful research about the English East India Company, that famous organization from the early modern global economy. There is much here to think about.

Julia Adams, author of The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe:
A brilliant dovetailing of theory and history, Modernity's Corruption is also a deeply generative work for social scientists who work in a broad range of areas—moralities of power, states and societies, and the politics of administration—pertinent to the present day.