Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Corruption, Empire
and Colonialism in the
Modern Era
A Global Perspective
Series Editors
Manuel Perez-Garcia, Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
Shanghai, China
Lucio De Sousa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo,
Japan
This series proposes a new geography of Global History research
using Asian and Western sources, welcoming quality research and
engaging outstanding scholarship from China, Europe and the Americas.
Promoting academic excellence and critical intellectual analysis, it offers a
rich source of global history research in sub-continental areas of Europe,
Asia (notably China, Japan and the Philippines) and the Americas and
aims to help understand the divergences and convergences between East
and West.
Advisory Board
Patrick O’Brien (London School of Economics)
Anne McCants (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Joe McDermott (University of Cambridge)
Pat Manning (Pittsburgh University)
Mihoko Oka (University of Tokyo)
Richard Von Glahn (University of California, Los Angeles)
Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla (Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla)
Shigeru Akita (Osaka University)
François Gipouloux (CNRS/FMSH)
Carlos Marichal (Colegio de Mexico)
Leonard Blusse (Leiden University)
Antonio Ibarra Romero (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico,
UNAM)
Giorgio Riello (University of Warwick)
Nakajima Gakusho (Kyushu University)
Liu Beicheng (Tsinghua University)
Li Qingxin (Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences)
Dennis O. Flynn (University of the Pacific)
J. B. Owens (Idaho State University)
Corruption, Empire
and Colonialism
in the Modern Era
A Global Perspective
Editors
Ronald Kroeze Pol Dalmau
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Pompeu Fabra University
Amsterdam, The Netherlands Barcelona, Spain
Frédéric Monier
University of Avignon
Avignon, France
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
Chapters 1, 5 and 7 are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further
details see license information in the chapters.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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Acknowledgements
Retrospectively, the idea behind this volume developed over the years as
we discussed the history of corruption, often in the rooms and corri-
dors of conference venues that were organised as part of the different
research projects we participated in. It became apparent to us that the
topic of corruption in the context of colonial empires deserved more
of our attention. To more systematically explore the topic and discuss
it, also with scholars from outside our own networks, we organised the
conference “The Corrupt Colony? Empire, Colonialism and Corruption
1800–present”, which was held at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam
on January 22, 2019. At that conference, draft papers were discussed and
explored that would form an important step towards the realisation of this
volume. In the months thereafter, all contributors reworked their texts
and a draft manuscript was sent to the publisher in the autumn of 2019.
A second round of revisions followed based on the comments of anony-
mous external reviewers, as well as the editors of the Palgrave Studies in
Comparative Global History.
After a final round of textual fine-tuning, the volume was ready for
publication. We would not have come this far without the support of
those that helped, inspired and advised us along the way, leading to the
eventual publication of this volume. Therefore, we like to express our
gratitude to different institutes and persons. Financial support from the
French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Avignon Univer-
sity, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Clue+, the Research
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
vii
viii CONTENTS
Index 357
List of Contributors
ix
x LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Fig. 8.1 The “Bruet [i.e. Bruat] farm” on the 1:50.000 scale
map (Document source: Institut géographique de
France, sheet no. 43 entitled “Palestro”, 1958 edition
last updated in 1936 with vines’ extension in scatter
plots) 213
Fig. 8.2 The “arib [i.e. azib] ben Zoubir” on a 1:40.000 civil
engineer plan, October 1876 (Document source:
ANOM, DA, 4 M/241) 224
Fig. 8.3 The farm plot [“ferme”] with the Bruat name
mentioned below on the 1:10.000 cadastral plan,
August 1877 (Document source: ANOM, DA, 4
M/241) 225
xi
CHAPTER 1
R. Kroeze (B)
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: d.b.r.kroeze@vu.nl
P. Dalmau
Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain
e-mail: pol.dalmau@upf.edu
F. Monier
University of Avignon, Avignon, France
e-mail: frederic.monier@univ-avignon.fr
of those that he had already found during his previous mandates. Rubí’s
contribution thus draws on the case of a reputed politician, in order to
examine the motivations to fight political corruption in the colonies and
the measures that were developed in such attempts.
In chapter 11, Jonathan Saha focuses on paperwork as a source of
corruption in colonial Myanmar (formerly Burma) around 1900. He
argues that the bureaucratic paperwork produced by colonial states was
often embroiled in malfeasant practices. Take, for example, the paper-
work that was used to regulate fishing in colonial Myanmar from the
late-nineteenth century onwards. Certain littoral areas and deltaic water-
ways were designated as fisheries. Individuals could bid for leases to these
fisheries in auctions. In non-leased open fisheries, people had to apply for
licenses to fish. In addition, to mitigate against overfishing, licenses were
required for the use of nets. However, the prescriptive nature of these
documents did not always have the effects that they were intended to
have. This chapter argues that by considering paperwork to be a particular
type of commodity, we can better understand the prevalence of particular
corrupt practices in the colonial context.
Xavier Huetz de Lemps, in the last contribution of Part II, takes
contemporary discussions about the colonial roots of today’s corrup-
tion as a starting point for an analysis of the role of corruption in
the Philippines in the decades around 1900. He argues that corrup-
tion in post-colonial Philippines is deeply rooted in the long colonial
history of the archipelago, but that this is less a matter of showing that
corruption is a very ancient local phenomenon and more about under-
standing the reasons why corrupt practices passed from one political
system to the other. During the Spanish period, embezzlement and abuse
of power became unremarkable behaviours for Spanish civil servants and
their Philippine subordinates. Beginning in 1898, the Americans gradu-
ally endowed the colony with modern democratic institutions. Yet, the
US imperial contradictions and the skill of the Philippine political elites
allowed the corruption to remain and to pervert the new institutions.
The final contribution to this volume is written by Jens Ivo Engels
and Frédéric Monier, which should be read more as a reflection and an
agenda for further research, than as a summary of each contribution.
Engels and Monier challenge the reader by highlighting the role of lasting
systems of gifts and patronage, and emphasise the influence of conflicting
norms and political changes for the rise (and absences) of debates about
colonial corruption in one context, but not in another. They, like other
14 R. KROEZE ET AL.
Notes
1. For example, for the Dutch-Indonesian case Jan Luiten van Zanden and
Daan Marks pointed to corruption and other “extractive institutions” in
their An Economic History of Indonesia of Indonesia 1800–2010 (London:
Routledge, 2012), 30, 31, 72, 107 and 113; Ewout Frankema and Frans
Buelens, Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development. The Belgian
Congo and the Netherlands Indies Compared (London: Routledge, 2013),
122–124.
2. Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire. India and the Creation of
Imperial Britain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Xavier
Huetz de Lemps, L’archipel des épices. La corruption de l’administra-
tion espagnole aux Philipinnes (fin XVIIIe-fin XIXe siècle) (Madrid: Casa
Velázquez, 2006); Didier Guignard, L’abus de pouvoir en Algérie coloniale
(1880–1914). Visibilité et singularité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris
Ouest, 2010); Chris Nierstrasz, In the shadow of the Company: The Dutch
East India Company and Its Servants in the Period of Its Decline, 1740–
1796 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Jonathan Saha, Law, Disorder and the Colonial
State: Corruption in Burma c.1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Another example is Steven Pierce, “Looking Like a State: Colonialism and
the Discourse of Corruption in Northern Nigeria,” Comparative Studies
in Society and History 48, no. 4 (2006): 887–914.
3. For example: C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World. Global Connec-
tions and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004) who refers to the
role of “old corruption” (p. 98) and “moral corruption” (p. 101), which
he links to the “old order” and the “politics of difference”; Burbank
and Cooper also, every now and then, point at the role of corruption in
the history of empires as shown in Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper,
Empires in World History. Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2010).
4. Cesare Mattina, Frédéric Monier, Olivier Dard and Jens Ivo Engels, eds.,
Dénoncer la corruption. Chevaliers blancs, pamphlétaires et promoteurs de
la transaprence à l’époque contemporaine (Paris: Demopolis, 2018).
5. Jens Ivo Engels, “Corruption and Anticorruption in the Era of Moder-
nity and Beyond,” in Anticorruption in History. From Antiquity to the
Modern Era, eds. Ronald Kroeze, André Vitoria and Guy Geltner (Oxford:
Oxford University Press 2018); Pol Dalmau, “Fighting Against Corrup-
tion. Newspapers and Public Morality in Modern Spain,” in Scandales
1 INTRODUCTION: CORRUPTION, EMPIRE … 15
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Burbank, Jane, and Frederick Cooper. Empires in World History: Power and the
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