There are not that many monographs on office-holding in early modern Britain. At first glance this comes as a surprise: office-holding and, by extension, basic structures of bureaucracy are an integral part of the historiography of the premodern European state and its genesis. Seen in the European context, meanwhile, the relative lack of research on Britain is less surprising: compared to France or Prussia, Britain has traditionally had the reputation of running on a relatively slim state apparatus, relying more heavily on mechanisms of communal self-governance than elsewhere. Whether this is an apt characterization has of course long been a matter of debate, particularly with a view to the seventeenth-century rise of the fiscal-military state and its imperial bureaucracy. Much remains to be explored regarding early modern office-holding in Britain, and Mark Knights’ most recent monograph on corruption and office is a welcome intervention in this field for more than one reason. Rather than a study of office for its own sake, Knights compellingly uses early modern ideas and practices of office-holding to explore both the early modern forms and the genesis of the modern notion of corruption—and vice versa. In doing so, the book does not get lost in the myriad stories of corruption and office throughout a rather long period (c.1600–c.1850), but it strives to conceptualize its findings on a more abstract level able to speak to multi-disciplinary interests in these matters by social scientists, public administrators, or sociologists. Perhaps most notably given the more recent historiographical change in viewing domestic British history as intricately connected to its imperial history, Knights’ book offers a wide geographical outlook, firmly integrating imperial developments in India or the Caribbean with domestic issues. The result is a remarkable new perspective on corruption and office in early modern Britain, based on an extraordinary command of both early modern sources and the vast secondary literature in history, and beyond.
The overall narrative of the book focuses on the development of corruption from a predominantly religious term around 1600 to the more modern sense of an abuse of office or a breach of trust in the mid-1800s, and, at the same time, on the reconceptualization of office from a form of private property to a position of public duty and public trust in the nineteenth century. Central to the study of these developments, Knights contends, is the notion of fiduciary trust as a key way of thinking about office and the moral and political boundaries of what was and wasn't permitted in office. This particularly British notion of trust, moreover, was also a product of early modern legal and intellectual developments and is therefore itself part of the story that Knights wants to tell. If anyone expects the spelling out of this larger narrative to be the clear-cut and linear progression in which it has often been framed in the past, then the book must be a disappointment, for it has a series of profound complications on offer. Knights is, firstly, acutely aware that the introduction of three both constantly changing and closely interlinked objects of study—“moving targets” (1), as he calls them—pose challenges to the formulation of any one clear narrative. Rather than a weakness, Knights turns this into a great strength. In the refusal to be drawn into neat narratives or the assumption of a “big bang” of modernization sometime around 1800, Knights’ story of the development of modern notions of office and corruption is refreshingly and convincingly “uncertain, inconsistent, patchy, and protracted” (20).
In this larger story, notions of office, corruption, and trust are, secondly, never treated as abstract ideals or concepts, but are subjected to a strictly historicizing analysis. Rather than giving in to the temptation of employing these notions in an exclusively conceptual way, Knights insists on the discursive and political uses of the language of corruption and office. The dividing line between licit and illicit behavior was, Knights shows, always shifting throughout the period in question, and it is these shifts, rather than abstract concepts, that he sees as indicative of the underlying historical dynamics. These were shaped by religious and legal traditions as much as economic and political developments and cultural notions of friendship and patronage. Thus, rather than treating these abstract notions as historical actors, as it were, Knights focuses on the way historical actors used and deployed these terms and narratives for their own benefit. This also means that disagreements as to what was or wasn't acceptable at any given time are treated as more important than descriptive indicators of the historical levels of corruption in early modern Britain. Because it is at moments of crisis or scandal that such disagreements frequently surfaced, moreover, they are often afforded prime place in the analysis.
With such a methodological approach, it is not surprising that the book also makes, thirdly, a strong case for relativization. The process as observed for early modern Britain is not, Knights argues, indicative of a universal process. Similar to the legal notion of trust that Knights shows to be unique for the British case, the modernizing process with a view to office and corruption is a distinctly British one. This is not taken to mean that it isn't instructive when looking at comparable cases, but rather that it doesn't serve as a universal model for how this process evolved within different polities. Again, this is a strength of the study. Perhaps the greatest fallacy when dealing with changing historical concepts is to oversimplify or freeze the social and historical background in which they operate. Knights is very much aware of this tendency, and his characterization of the early modern and eighteenth-century British state is fully appreciative of its complexities and contingencies across several centuries. The same goes for other commonly used simplifications: for example, the notion of a more or less neat division of public and private.
Questions remain. How many moving targets can one narrative reasonably sustain? How many complexities does the historian's ultimate dependence on narrative permit? Clearly, it takes a very experienced and skillful historian to perform this kind of analysis. The successful navigation of the narrative complexities of what Knights sets out to do in this study is one of the book's greatest strengths, as is the ease with which he combines the detailed case analysis with the overall theme and its more abstract implications for the early modern (and modern) British state and empire. That some of the chapters, for example, on office, corruption, or trust, have the character of concise overviews that make them particularly useful for teaching purposes is clearly a bonus, as are the detailed guides to the available literature in the bibliography, and the comparative outlook beyond the British case contained in the conclusion. Overall, this is a timely and persuasive contribution to both contemporary debates about corruption and office as well as scholarship on early modern Britain and one that will, indubitably and deservedly, have a strong impact on future research.
