Corruption In The Iberian Empires

This book provides new perspectives into a subject that historians have largely overlooked. The contributors use fresh archival research from Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico, and the Philippines to examine the lives of slaves and farmworkers as well as self-serving magistrates, bishops, and traders in contraband. The authors show that corruption was a powerful discourse in the Atlantic world. Investigative judges could dismiss culprits, jail them, or, sometimes, have them “garroted and their corpses publicly displayed.”

The contributors use fresh archival research from Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico, and the Philippines to examine the lives of slaves and farmworkers as well as self-serving magistrates, bishops, and traders in contraband.

Provides the first detailed analysis of the evolution of the concept of corruption in colonial Mexico.

Answering the calls made to overcome methodological nationalism, this volume is the first examination of the links between corruption and imperial rule in the modern world. It does so through a set of original studies that examine the multi-layered nature of corruption in four different empires (Great Britain, Spain, the Netherlands and France) and their possessions in Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. It offers a key read for scholars interested in the fields of corruption, colonialism/empire and global history. The chapters ‘Introduction: Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era: Towards a Global Perspective’, ‘“Corrupt and rapacious”: Colonial Spanish-American past through the eyes of early nineteenth century contemporaries. A contribution from the history of emotions’, and ‘Colonial Normativity? Corruption in the Dutch-Indonesian Relationship in the Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries’ are Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

This open access book analyses Iberian expansion by using knowledge accumulated in recent years to test some of the most important theories regarding Europe’s economic development. Adopting a comparative perspective, it considers the impact of early globalization on Iberian and Western European institutions, social development and political economies. In spite of globalization’s minor importance from the commercial perspective before 1750, this book finds its impact decisive for institutional development, political economies, and processes of state-building in Iberia and Europe. The book engages current historiographies and revindicates the need to take the concept of composite monarchies as a point of departure in order to understand the period’s economic and social developments, analysing the institutions and societies resulting from contact with Iberian peoples in America and Asia. The outcome is a study that nuances and contests an excessively-negative yet prevalent image of the Iberian societies, explores the difficult relationship between empires and globalization and opens paths for comparisons to other imperial formations.

Corruption is a preoccupation of governments and societies across place and time, from the 18th-19th Century British, Chinese, and Iberian empires to 20th Century Nazi Germany, Russia, the United States, and India. This study offers three different perspectives on corruption. The first chapters highlight corrupt practices, taking as a point of departure a technocratic definition of corruption. The second part of the book views corruption through the lens of discourses of corruption, revealing that accusations of corruption have been employed as tools, often in the context of contestations of power. The essays in the third part of the book treat corruption as a process, taking into account its causes and effects and their impact on society, economics, and politics. Contributors: Jeremy Adelman, Virginie Coulloudon, William Doyle, Diego Gambetta, Norman J. W. Goda, Robert Gregg, Michael Johnston, William Chester Jordan, Emmanuel Kreike, Vinod Pavarala, Dilip Simeon, Pierre-Etienne Will, David Witwer, Philip Woodfine William Chester Jordan is Professor of History at Princeton University; Emmanuel Kreike is Assistant Professor of African History and Director of the African Studies Program at Princeton University

A pioneering examination of the role smuggling played in the transformation of Spanish Caribbean society and culture in the seventeenth century.

This Handbook re-examines the concept of early modern history in a European and global context. Volume II engages with philosophy, science, art and architecture, music, and the Enlightenment, and examines the military and political developments within and beyond the boundaries of Europe.