Claims of corruption have turned into political weapons, the same logic which justifies colonial rule of a geographic other.

Recent years have also seen a series of new publications on the history of corruption in Europe. These studies have shown that corruption as an idea and discourse, as well as a practice, played an important role in the history of modern politics and state-building processes. These works have highlighted the complexity of corruption in the modern era, for example, that corrupt practices continued to exist even though “modern” elites proclaimed they had freed their regimes from them. Moreover, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, accusations and debates about corruption served to initiate reform or, simply, as a pretext to undermine old structures and representatives of the so-called “Ancien Régime”.4 Therefore, anticorruption campaigns could and were also used as political weapons, to get rid of opponents and to promote politicised institutional reforms.5 Additionally, several historians have argued that the understanding of corruption as well as the link between corruption and political reform entered a new phase somewhere towards the end of the eighteenth century. From that moment onwards, instead of simply being a word to be used for a great variety of deviations (sexual, moral, religious, administrative), corruption became more often defined in political terms as the misuse of public office or the general interest for private gain. Moreover, it became an absolutely non-tolerable phenomenon in the public arena. This does not mean, of course, that corruption ceased to exist; rather, corruption became a more serious and challenging problem in terms of political legitimacy.6 As a result, a new political discourse developed in which corruption was portrayed as a remnant of “traditional” societies—in which “Ancien Régime” practices such as patronage and clientelism were rampant—that could be eliminated if the appropriate “modern” reforms were adopted.

Although, there is still debate among historians about how sharp the break with the past really was7—see also the contribution to this volume by Jens Ivo Engels and Frédéric Monier—these insights that have been framed in the context of European history can bring valuable perspectives to the history of colonialism and empire. For example, it can help us to locate the development and consequences of the idea that corruption was a problem of traditional regimes and that it belonged to a geographical “Other”: the colony and its local culture and inhabitants. This argument was used by European colonial elites in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to justify colonial rule: it was legitimate as it would end corruption and bring modernity, so it was argued. Indeed, if corruption had already been present in the Enlightenment’s idea of “Oriental despotism”, it now became part of the civilising discourse of nineteenth-century European colonialism.8 As such, the study of colonial corruption allows the tackling of historiographical debates about the ideological fundaments of civilising discourses, modernisation programs and the legitimacy of colonial rule, which is an important theme in the history of colonialism (as well as in postcolonial and decolonisation studies, too).9