Modernity's corruption empire and morality in the making of British India
"Modernity's Corruption is rooted in a case study of the British East India Company's rise to territorial power in South Asia between the middle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It develops a novel explanation for the transition between two concepts of corruption. The first...
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| Format: | Buch |
| Sprache: | English |
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New York
Columbia University Press
[2023]
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| Online-Zugang: | Inhaltsverzeichnis |
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| Zusammenfassung: | "Modernity's Corruption is rooted in a case study of the British East India Company's rise to territorial power in South Asia between the middle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It develops a novel explanation for the transition between two concepts of corruption. The first, that corruption is the loss of balance of competing passions within one's self. One could be corrupted when greed overcomes pride. The second, and more modern one, is putting one's personal interests ahead of the group. Nicholas Hoover Wilson argues that the transition between the two forms of corruption was the unintended consequence of a bitter conflict among British East India Company officials and the changing audiences to which they justified themselves in Britain. As audiences to the conflicts within the Company began to include those unfamiliar with the details of administration, new justifications for officials' behavior shaped a unified sense of moral selfhood among administrators, defining the ethical boundaries of state, society, and economy. In short, the book identified the emergence of a moral boundary that has governed behavior within modern bureaucratic organizations ever since"-- Today, "corruption" generally refers to pursuing personal interests at the expense of one's responsibilities, the law, or the common good. It calls to mind some official violating their public duty for private gain, suggesting seamy bureaucracies taking payoffs, kickbacks, and bribes. Yet at other times, notions of corruption were rooted in a more expansive view of the causes of people's behavior and the appropriate ways to regulate conduct. In this understanding, to be "corrupt" meant losing a delicate balance among competing appetites under specific circumstances and in the eyes of peers. Why did a narrower definition of corruption become dominant?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. He argues that the modern idea of corruption arose as an unintended consequence of conflicts among company officials and the changing audiences to which they justified themselves in Britain. This new understanding unified an imperial elite at risk of fragmenting into irreconcilable moral worlds and, in the process, helped redefine the boundaries of state, society, and economy. Modernity's Corruption is at once a novel historical sociology of imperial administration and its contradictions, a fresh argument about the nature of corruption and its political and organizational effects, and a reinvigoration of classic arguments about the nature and consequences of global modernity |
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| Beschreibung: | XIV, 296 Seiten Illustrationen |
| ISBN: | 9780231192187 9780231192194 |