Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and Its Empire, 1600-1850

Trust and Distrust offers the first overview of Britain’s history of corruption in office in the pre-modern era, 1600-1850, and as such will appeal not only to historians, but also to political and social scientists. Mark Knights paints a picture of the interaction of the domestic and imperial stories of corruption in office, showing how these stories were intertwined and related. Linking corruption in office to the domestic and imperial state has not been attempted before, and Knights does this by drawing on extensive interdisciplinary sources relating to the East India Company as well as other colonial officials in the Atlantic World and elsewhere in Britain’s emerging empire.

Both ’corruption’ and ’office’ were concepts that were in evolution during the period 1600-1850 and underwent very significant but protracted change which this study charts and seeks to explain. The book makes innovative use of the concept of trust, which helped to shape office in ways that underlined principles of selflessness, disinterestedness, integrity, and accountability in officials.

Mark Knights, Professor of History, University of Warwick

Mark Knights has published extensively on early modern Britain with a particular focus on its political culture. His first book was Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678-1681 (1994), and he has published two further books with OUP on later Stuart culture. He moved to the University of Warwick in 2007 and has directed its Early Modern and Eighteenth Century Centre. The research for Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire, 1600-1950 won two awards, the first 2014-16 an AHRC Leadership Fellowship and in 2020 a Leverhulme Fellowship.