ANTICORRUPTION IN HISTORY Anticorruption in History From Antiquity to the Modern Era Edited by RONALD KROEZE, ANDRÉ VITÓRIA and G. GELTNER 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2018 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940334 ISBN 978–0–19–880997–5 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. Acknowledgments As our journey nears its end, or at least a major port of call, it is time to thank some fellow travelers. What began with a flash visit to Amsterdam, some six years ago, by the indefatigable Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, soon became a major research endeavor, involving some old and many new colleagues. Their current thoughts on the history of anticorruption fill the following pages, and we, the editors, are grateful for their enthusiasm, generosity and collaborative spirit, as well as for the support we received from the ANTICORRP project in general. Several other people, whose invaluable input might otherwise be obscured, deserve our explicit recognition: Mihály Fazekas, Philip Harling, Peter Heather, William Chester Jordan, Neil McLynn, Alexander Nützenadel and Bo Rothstein. Our former Amsterdam colleagues, Maaike van Berkel and James Kennedy, made the entire process especially pleasurable and must each, as James would surely put it, “get the credit they deserve.” Oxford University Press and Stephanie Ireland dipped into somewhat unfamiliar waters with this volume, yet brought it smoothly to completion nonetheless. The anonymous reviewers for the Press have been critical and encouraging in equal measures. If this volume has achieved anything beyond the sum of its parts already at this stage, it is in no small measure a reflection of their insights. R.K. (Amsterdam) A.V. (Paris) G.G. (Amsterdam/Stanford) February 2017 Table of Contents List of Figures and Illustrations ix List of Contributors xi Introduction: Debating Corruption and Anticorruption in History 1 Ronald Kroeze, André Vitória and G. Geltner I. ANTIQUITY 1. Corruption and Anticorruption in Democratic Athens 21 Claire Taylor 2. Fighting Corruption: Political Thought and Practice in the Late Roman Republic 35 Valentina Arena 3. The Corrupting Sea: Law, Violence and Compulsory Professions in Late Antiquity 49 Sarah E. Bond II. THE MIDDLE AGES 4. Fighting Corruption between Theory and Practice: The Land of the Euphrates and Tigris in Transition, Ninth to Eleventh Centuries 65 Maaike van Berkel 5. Late Medieval Polities and the Problem of Corruption: France, England and Portugal, 1250–1500 77 André Vitória 6. The Problem of the Personal: Tackling Corruption in Later Medieval England, 1250–1550 91 John Watts 7. Fighting Corruption in the Italian City-State: Perugian Officers’ End of Term Audit (sindacato) in the Fourteenth Century 103 G. Geltner III. EARLY MODERNITY 8. “A Water-Spout Springing from the Rock of Freedom”? Corruption in Sixteenth- and Early-Seventeenth-Century England 125 G. W. Bernard 9. A Sick Body: Corruption and Anticorruption in Early Modern Spain 139 Francisco Andújar Castillo, Antonio Feros and Pilar Ponce Leiva viii Table of Contents 10. Corruption and Anticorruption in France between the 1670s and the 1780s: The Example of the Provincial Administration of Languedoc 153 Stéphane Durand IV. FROM EARLY MODERN TO MODERN TIMES 11. Corruption and Anticorruption in the Era of Modernity and Beyond 167 Jens Ivo Engels 12. Anticorruption in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain 181 Mark Knights 13. Statebuilding, Establishing Rule of Law and Fighting Corruption in Denmark, 1660–1900 197 Mette Frisk Jensen 14. The Paradox of “A High Standard of Public Honesty”: A Long-Term Perspective on Dutch History 211 James Kennedy and Ronald Kroeze 15. Corruption and Anticorruption in the Romanian Principalities: Rules of Governance, Exceptions and Networks, Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century 225 Ovidiu Olar 16. Corruption and Anticorruption in Early-Nineteenth-Century Sweden: A Snapshot of the State of the Swedish Bureaucracy 239 Andreas Bågenholm 17. State, Family and Anticorruption Practices in the Late Ottoman Empire 251 Iris Agmon V. MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY HISTORY 18. Corruption and the Ethical Standards of British Public Life: National Debates and Local Administration, 1880–1914 267 James Moore 19. Lockheed (1977) and Flick (1981–1986): Anticorruption as a Pragmatic Practice in the Netherlands and Germany 279 Ronald Kroeze 20. Corruption in an Anticorruption State? East Germany under Communist Rule 293 André Steiner Afterword 305 Michael Johnston Endnotes 311 Bibliography 389 Index 433 List of Figures and Illustrations 7.1. Prosecution of Officials’ Malpractice by the Perugian Sindaco, 1332–1390 111 12.1. Thomas Rowlandson, The Champion of the People (1784) 195 15.1. Circuit of Grace and Powers in the Romanian Principalities during the Ottoman period 228 15.2. Wisdom and Justice flank the coat of arms of Moldavia and Wallachia 237 List of Contributors Iris Agmon Ben Gurion University of the Negev Francisco Andújar Castillo University of Almería Valentina Arena University College London Andreas Bågenholm University of Gothenburg Maaike van Berkel Radboud University Nijmegen G. W. Bernard University of Southampton Sarah E. Bond University of Iowa Stéphane Durand University of Avignon Jens Ivo Engels Technical University of Darmstadt Antonio Feros University of Pennsylvania Mette Frisk Jensen University of Aarhus G. Geltner University of Amsterdam Michael Johnston Colgate University James Kennedy University College, Utrecht Mark Knights University of Warwick Ronald Kroeze Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam James Moore University of Leicester Ovidiu Olar Romanian Academy, Bucharest Pilar Ponce Leiva Complutense University, Madrid André Steiner University of Potsdam Claire Taylor University of Wisconsin–Madison André Vitória University of Amsterdam John Watts University of Oxford Introduction Debating Corruption and Anticorruption in History Ronald Kroeze, André Vitória and G. Geltner The present volume is the first major comparative study of how societies and polities in and beyond European history defined legitimate power in terms of fighting corruption and designed specific mechanisms to pursue that agenda. Corruption is widely seen today as one of the most urgent problems we face as a global society, undermining trust in government and financial institutions, eco- nomic efficiency, the principle of equality before the law and human wellbeing in general. Corruption, in short, is a major hurdle on the “path to Denmark”—a feted blueprint for stable and successful state-building. The resonance of this view explains why efforts to promote anticorruption policies have proliferated in recent years. But while the subject of corruption and anticorruption (straddling the public/ private divide) has captured the attention of politicians, scholars, NGOs and the global media, scant attention has been paid to the link between corruption and the creation, change and implementation of anticorruption policies over time and place, with the attendant diversity in how to define, identify and address corruption. Economists, political scientists and policy makers in particular have been generally content with tracing the differences between low-corruption and high-corruption countries in the present and enshrining them in all manner of rankings and indices. Questions about these rankings have been raised many times and new lists, based on revised methodologies, continually emerge.1 By comparison, the long-term trends— social, political, economic, cultural—potentially undergirding the position of the countries in those indices continue to play a very small role. Such a historical approach could help explain major moments of change in the past, which in turn may support or undermine the perceptions and unwarranted certainties we hold today about the reasons for the success and failure of specific anticorruption policies and their relation to a country’simage(ofitselforasconstruedfrom outside) as being more or less corrupt. It is precisely this scholarly lacuna that the present volume sets out to fill. THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ANTICORRUPTION AND THE PRESENT VOLUME Anticorruption