Writing a response like this is a peculiar thing; four years have now passed since I sent the final manuscript for Modernity’s Corruption (Reference Wilson2023) to the publisher, so coming back to it is like revisiting an old traveling companion. On the one hand, this is individually poignant because my companion and I journeyed through the hard times of writing a dissertation, serving in an uncertain and insecure academic appointment, and only parted ways because it was necessary for us to let each other go (if only so there can be a book!) On the other hand, if a book has any measure of success, you find, on revisiting them, that your companion has gathered friends and interlocutors. Some of them you know well, some you admire, and still others are strangers. But they all have something to say about the path you two walked together.
Given that having three experts in your (multifaceted) field bothered to read and think about your work is an extraordinary honor, and I take the seriousness of the probing engagement by Professors Matthew Norton, Anurag Sinha, and George Steinmetz as a sign that Modernity’s Corruption provoked the style of dialog and conversation that I’d hoped. In my view, that conversation revolves around four points: (1) What is “corruption”?; (2) What makes it “modern”?; (3) What does knowing more about these two questions tell us about the operation of modern states and empires?; and (4) What was the explanatory account of the emergence of “modern corruption” in the specific case of Britain and the English East India Company in India (hereafter EIC)? I won’t rehash my own arguments about each of these points – each of the respondents does this already, and I think they have understood my argument very well – but I think each of their incitements to further discourse revolves around extensions – in one way or another – to each of these four themes.
What is “corruption”?
First, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Modernity’s Corruption makes a claim about what corruption is: a style of moral accusation made by at least one party against another, grounded in a presumed “moral background” (Abend Reference Abend2014), and meant to mobilize some audience to the accusing party’s cause. You’ll notice this definition is almost purely formal – that is, it says nothing about which moral background is invoked or who composes the audience to accusations, or even who the parties involved are – and I think it is that feature that generates the first set of probes from my interlocutors.
I decided on this definition not only because it encompassed the various behaviors EIC officials thought were corrupt, but also because it provides an epistemological advantage for the historical study of corruption. Accusing someone of corruption is necessarily discursive, and doing so to try and mobilize an audience to your side means (sometimes) spelling out why they are corrupt and you are not (that is, articulating your moral background). Put simply, this generates a lot of rich material to work with. It is true, and Norton correctly notes it, that this draws me away from analyzing corruption thoroughly as a Geertz-ian “cultural system,” and while I did try to allude to the way these discourses we embodied in practices throughout the EIC (such as various duels, fights, and even the overthrow of the Governor of Madras, George Pigot), I certainly did not centralize that part of my analysis.Footnote 1
Steinmetz asks a parallel question about the role of morality in my understanding of corruption – and beyond. Indeed, his probing analysis correctly asserts that I see corruption accusations as a crucial vector for articulating (and asserting, and institutionalizing) moral orders, which is to say the notion that certain behaviors, actions, and ways of being in the world are virtuous and others corrupt. But, he goes on to ask, isn’t it possible that there are spaces (such as modern colonialism) in which any question of moral ordering is set aside, and we act with (following Strawson and Durkheim) an objective attitude towards others as though we are in a moral vacuum?
My answer to this is yes and no. It is “no” in terms of a strong theoretical posture toward morality as a keystone concept in social life – I deliberately would like to sidestep this question because I think the answer for a historical sociologist is empirical. Moral concepts (and those I myself implicitly and explicitly employ as a scholar) are so deeply intertwined with rising and falling historical configurations of objective, subjective, and intersubjective understandings that I’m skeptical of the empirical use of trying to find a single kind of “master” concept of one kind or another. But my answer is also “yes,” because when we treat moral assertions as empirical social commitments asserted by actors we are studying, it is manifestly true that accusations of corruption (and the inherent immorality they carried) mutated, especially in the later periods of my study, into an “Indian disease” (Travers Reference Travers2025). This “disease,” if contracted by an Anglo administrator, certainly implied that they had become a fundamentally different kind of person than the condescendingly virtuous, reformed, chauvinistic later EIC officers like Charles Trevelyan.
Finally, Norton correctly notes that I restricted myself to the analysis of Universal and Particular moral backgrounds.Footnote 2 He wonders whether there are others, and to this, I answer a qualified “yes.” I meant both of those categories as types to capture particular tendencies I saw in disputes among EIC officials over corruption and to organize what I thought their implicit moral views were; but to me, nothing forbids there being a multitude of potential moral backgrounds being applied to the analysis. With that said, however, I speculate that in many, if not most, of these orders, we might expect something like Abbott’s “fractal” (Reference Abbott2001) repetition of a Universal/Particular conceptual division within each one.
What makes it “modern”?
Another theme of Modernity’s Corruption involves the first term of the title: the book is an analysis of the shift from a non-modern form of corruption to a modern one. My claim is that what makes this form modern is the ideal that there is a moral standard (like market behavior or public duty) that defines proper conduct of your social role. This stands in contrast to what I call a Situational moral background, where propriety (and therefore, what is corrupt) is defined by the judgment of knowledgeable peers and is relative to local moral norms.
In his commentary, Norton wonders whether or not this claim about modernity means that the Universal moral background replaces the Situational, or whether it is instead “a model of oscillation from particular to universal.” To this I would emphatically agree with Sinha’s characterization of my argument: “there are, in fact, two simultaneous and competing moral orders that we inhabit” (my emphasis). That is, any shift toward a Universal moral background depended on specific institutional conditions (like colonialism or structures like it) and only held a dominant position insofar as it continued to “work” as a form of moral accusation. And indeed, those conditions sustaining a Universal moral background can unwind, and that may even be happening right now. One reading of Trumpism, after all, is that his corruption appears so multifaceted and omnipresent precisely because the institutions and cultural consensus around a Universal moral background have fractured, to be replaced with a network of linked Situational moments to judge what is and isn’t corrupt. As I discuss in the book, this Situational outlook is common, and it may eventually be replaced by a renewed Universal background of some kind, or it may simply persist.Footnote 3
What does modern corruption have to do with states and empires?
I now turn to the central general explanatory mechanism in my account: the role of colonialism and empire relative to the modern state. This question is most pointedly asked by Steinmetz, who wonders how I reconcile the claim that a Universal moral background became dominant within the EIC, whereas modern colonialism is usually understood as predicated on some variety of Chatterjee’s “rule of colonial difference,” which seems to imply a binary moral outlook.Footnote 4
To me, this question revolves around how exactly we read Chatterjee (and other theorists of modern colonialism). I prefer to split “colonialism” into two. As a second-order concept, it is a generic label for a kind of political formation whose administration encounters the problem of governing difference, whether that difference is taken as “real” (to the analyst) or “perceived” (by the indigenous people, administrators, or metropolitan population). At this level, I think “colonialism” spans all periods of my analysis (and, like Chatterjee, I think there are modern state governance practices that easily meet this definition). As a first-order concept, meanwhile, “colonialism” can mean the outlooks colonial administrators, colonized people, and metropolitan populations use to legitimate and justify the power arrangements encountered. Put differently, colonialism in the first order answers the question posed by colonialism in the second order.
If we make this move, for me, the tension between a Universal moral background and the binarism of modern colonialism resolves. This is because the Universal moral background, in this context, simultaneously supplied accounts of the legitimacy (because colonizers were virtuous and the colonized corrupt) and necessity (because the colonized population was not assimilated while still corrupt) of colonial rule, while explaining, if not excusing, some of its excesses (colonial rule was oppressive either because of corrupt indigenous colonial officials or because officials from the colonizers had themselves been corrupted). In a phrase, in modern colonialism (and as has been recognized by many scholars of the tension of classical liberalism), a Universal moral background paradoxically reproduces binarism.
What does modern corruption have to do with Britain and India?
Finally, Sinha (himself a superior scholar of the EIC) and Steinmetz ask pointed questions about the location and timing of the concrete shift within the EIC and between Britain and the EIC. They both (in different language) ask whether the shift to a Universal moral framework in India really did happen before it did in Britain. After all, there is an excellent line of scholarship emphasizing the role of the Scottish Enlightenment (most famously, Hont Reference Hont1983) and the “Waning of ‘Old Corruption’” (e.g., Harling Reference Harling1996) in Britain itself. And more pointedly, Sinha asks whether my neglect of the impeachment of Warren Hastings, which is usually seen as a seminal transition in the EIC’s direction (Dirks Reference Dirks2009), is intentional.
I group the neglect of Hastings together with the questions of timing and location because I think my answer is of a piece: I don’t think that to ask whether the causal relations were “really” grounded in India or Britain is the right way to put it. Instead, I think the emergence of a Universal moral background involved the transformation of Britain’s empire as a system. After all, Adam Smith (in his still-neglected Theory of Moral Sentiments) invokes the “impartial spectator” to grapple with the problem of propriety among the unfamiliar relations of commercial society, and while Warren Hastings’ impeachment (1787–1795) certainly was a moment of publicity of the EIC’s affairs, it came after the structurally much more consequential Pitt’s India Act (1784). As Steinmetz aptly puts it, there is a process of refraction or systemic causation at play here, and I regret that I still can’t quite describe it. At the same time, I do think it extends beyond the late-eighteenth century, and a fuller analysis of Charles Trevelyan’s life and career might well bear out a deep connection between his time in India and his later participation in the domestic Northcote-Trevelyan civil service reforms.Footnote 5
Coda
By way of conclusion, I would first like to thank my respondents once again for their trenchant insights. Second, while my next empirical work on corruption is leaving India (for a study of American political development and the American Bureau of Indian Affairs), I am happy to say that some of the themes addressed here are receiving a fresh look in Garrido et al. (Reference Garrido, Zaloznaya and Hoover Wilson2026). This work, which is happily a collective journey, has been a wonderful opportunity to extend some insights from the work discussed here.
