Governing Difference: Corruption, Empire, and the Founding of East India College

• In Event: The Sociology of Corruption.

Abstract

This paper explains why the meanings of corruption in British India were reformulated at the turn of the nineteenth century. As the public focus shifted from the venal accumulation of wealth by individual agents of the East India Company to the responsibilities of governing millions of alien subjects, a controversy erupted between the Court of Directors of the Company and the Governor-General of India, Richard Wellesley, about the fitness of the Company’s agents to fill the roles of governors. In 1800, Wellesley unilaterally set up a training college in India for the Company’s recruits, which threatened to overturn the directors’ absolute prerogative over nominations to Company service. The disagreement produced a constitutional crisis once the Board of Control, the Company's Parliament-appointed overseer, sided with Wellesley, resulting eventually in the founding of East India College in Haileybury in 1805 to train future governors of India. Instead of private gain from public office, the idea of corruption in this new imperial context was employed to address issues of institutional overreach, good government, and bureaucratic competence. By taking an embedded approach to corruption, it becomes possible to trace the process by which these new meanings of corruption emerged, both as a response to contextual transformations and as a rearticulation of older ideas applied to newer settings.

Author

• Anurag Sinha, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities