It’s a splendid book. The focus of this response, then, is not quibbles or doubts about the internal logic, argument, or evidence of the book but an attempt to draw Wilson out on how it relates to its immediate theoretical and empirical environs. To do so, I ask three questions about complications to the main account presented by Modernity’s Corruption.

One of the goals of the book is to disentangle “the chaotic intersection of two moral orders” (Wilson Reference Wilson2023: 3) that structured corruption as a category of thought and action in the eighteenth-century East India Company (EIC). Toward the beginning of the book’s account, corruption accusations were made, heard, and responded to in the context of what Wilson calls a “Situational” moral background – where corruption is judged according to localized and particular norms by an audience steeped in the local context. As the EIC became increasingly integrated into Britain’s territorial empire, translocal networks of information exchange and governance became more robust and behavior that had been judged in the local and contextual “Situational” mode were instead subjected to the “Universal” moral background of corruption. The “Universal” moral background purports to transcend local knowledge and eschew local context in favor of universalistic, impersonal, and abstract modes of judgment. As Wilson at one point writes, the book’s fundamental goal is to “explain how the category of corruption, as employed and understood by EIC administrators, came loose from one moral background and became anchored to another” (Reference Wilsonibid: 35).

The theoretical emphasis on two moral orders that EIC administrators employed when adjudicating corruption accusations is crucial for organizing the theoretical and empirical complexities that the book is dealing with. But to what extent is a focus on these two moral backgrounds a general template for research on corruption (in general as well as specifically in the context of the eighteenth-century British Empire). One way this argument could go would be that while Situational and Universal are the two key moral backgrounds in the story told by this book, scholars of corruption and morality could – and for many questions would have to – identify other moral orders associated with other facets of corruption. Wilson is, of course, aware of this – “there were at least two different moral backgrounds to which accusations of corruption could be attached in eighteenth-century Britain,” he writes (Reference Wilsonibid: 81, italics added). This invites us to peer beyond the analytical frame of the book and to consider what other moral backgrounds might also have mattered. For instance, while moral backgrounds related to courts and the law do not come up often in Modernity’s Corruption, in many other cases they are an important context for thinking about corruption accusations. Should analysts be quick and ready to add something like “The Law” to the list of core moral backgrounds? Legal moral backgrounds, of course, often have their own unique discursive and institutional requirements for speech. For instance, if one were to dive more deeply into the story of Thomas Rumbold (Reference Wilsonibid: 147–9) who was sued in Chancery and subjected to a Parliamentary Bill of Pains and Penalties, should the jurisprudence of Chancery and the institutional dynamics of Parliament be added to the moral backgrounds we consider, or should an attempt be made to understand them in the broader terms of Situational and Universal moral orders? And if we relax the focus adopted by Modernity’s Corruption on moral accusations, does this entail introducing into the analysis of the sociology of corruption a whole new set of moral backgrounds to consider? Opportunism, for instance, relativistic discourses, patrimonial discourses, and the particular particularisms that one would find in whatever specific context one looked? Or would Wilson expect Universal and Situational to retain their pride of place in the analysis? Are we to understand the emphasis on Situational and Universal moral backgrounds as an exercise in theoretical abduction to help form and answer the question of the transition from one to another moral background, which is the riveting central focus of the book? Or do these two moral backgrounds have a stronger claim on our analytical attention that we should expect to transcend the specific formulation of the question offered by Modernity’s Corruption?

The second question involves the analysis of moral backgrounds. In this book, moral backgrounds play an important causal role in determining the outcomes of individual cases and in shaping the structures of organizational fields and imperial discourses. The way that these are articulated is through broad characterization that is then fleshed out through particular cases. This works very well for understanding the kind of broad shifts that Modernity’s Corruption documents. But in a book with such clear Geertzian overtones, “the book … takes as its puzzle the murky, chaotic world” in which the actions of EIC officials “made good sense to some observers and were bitterly rejected as moral transgressions by others” (Reference Wilsonibid: 3), it is striking that Wilson does not provide an account of situational or universal morality “as a cultural system.” Instead, these discourses are given a broad characterization through the mechanisms of defining elite intellectual commentary corresponding to each moral background (Reference Wilsonibid: 49–60). The question for Wilson is whether the approach adopted in his book should be taken as a general model for analyzing moral backgrounds or as a model driven by the more specific analytical demands of the Universal and Situational conflict that defined the moral world of corruption that pertained to the eighteenth-century EIC.

Finally, Modernity’s Corruption, as the title suggests, argues that the shift of moral backgrounds it documents is an instance of a broader historical transition to the modern, universalistic moral background of corruption. But wouldn’t a less transitional and more oscillating theoretical story do just as well? The argument for an account based on the continual rise and fall of different moral backgrounds would be that the circumstances Modernity’s Corruption uses to explain how the Universal moral background gained purchase – practices and norms formerly adjudicated by people with local knowledge of how things are done there were increasingly subjected to the distant gaze of imperial administration which often found, in accordance with its universalistic conception, local norms and practices to be severely corrupt – is a continually recurring story, suggesting a model of oscillation from particular to universal as opposed to an epochal transition (a process that Alexander has called “the societalization of social problems”). Situational moral backgrounds and orders abound; the cracks and crevices of complex societies often offer concealment, but sometimes circumstances conspire to attract the distant gaze of those who judge in the modern and universal way. From this perspective, we still live in the world of Modernity’s Corruption, rather than in a world that followed it.