What does it mean to think about “corruption” historically? For the longest while, the regnant paradigm in the study of corruption was a prescriptivist one: projecting contemporary, one-size-fits-all definitions of the phenomenon onto the past, and, in the process, often reinforcing notions of longue durée systemic causes and processes that made “corruption” an endemic issue for “backward” regions – not least in Eastern, Central, or Southern Europe. However, in recent years, a constructivist turn has allowed for a finer-grained historicisation of “corruption” as something which must be understood on/in the terms of the actors themselves: what one perceived and denounced as deviations from one’s contemporary legal, social, political, and moral norms came with a vocabulary that is equally deserving of investigation. The challenges this poses, then, are that of retracing how our own vocabulary came into being, of how the meanings of “corruption” were shaped and renegotiated over time, and, in the absence of “corruption” as category in a given historical context, of how we might use it retrospectively as a heuristic descriptor.

These methodological concerns were also at the heart of the lively debates that dotted the two days of the conference held in Bucharest in June of 2024, which aimed to contextualise the transnational connections underlying the birth of a modern vocabulary of “corruption” in the eastern half of Europe. Perhaps the most insistently recurring topic for reflection was that of what a historian might need to be on the lookout for when setting out to investigate “corruption” without running the risk of doing so anachronistically, at a time when the term itself was first making its way into the various languages of the region. This emphasis on historical semantics thus entails the need for distinguishing between the polemic usage of “corruption” as a category in historiographical debates, on the one hand, and the shifting, hard to translate vocabularies of the past, on the other, as BOĞAÇ ERGENE (Burlington) noted with regard to the Ottoman Empire, which has long been stereotyped as a virtual shorthand for “corruption”, even without much sustained examination of what corresponded to said category in Ottoman terms. EDA GÜÇLÜ (Vienna) examined the definitions of “corruption” the new liberal actors of the Istanbul’s municipal scene debated in the nineteenth-century. She explained how they employed a discourse of honor against corruption as a moral tool in fashioning institutional ideologies and demanding local autonomy.

Othering the Ottoman Empire as a space of “corruption” and decline, argued LUCIEN FRARY (Lawrence / Bucharest), relied in no small part on the politics of backwardness and exoticisation that underlied both Western and Russian travel accounts, which points to the broader problem of how historical constructions of “corruption” must be examined both in terms of external projections, and of internalised self-perceptions. In turn, the discourse of Ottoman “corruption”, “decay”, and “tyranny” was further mobilised in post-imperial settings as a means of delineating a present of desired progress from a difficult past, as ALEX TIPEI (Montréal / Bucharest) described in the context of post-revolutionary Greek politics, where weaponising such tropes against one’s political opponents came with the intent of discrediting them in the eyes of a Western Other. Or, as MYRTO LAMPROU (Patras) showed, “corruption” could equally be used in the same period as an accusation meant to contest the belonging of entire groups to the Greek nation, in the context of debates on the (non)inclusion of the “heterochtone” diaspora in the body politic of the emerging nation-state.

Part of this process, and a recurring theme of the conference in general, was the figure of the “Phanariotes” – Hellenophone elites originally hailing from Istanbul whose networks of influence extended, between the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to the ruling classes of the tributary principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. Be it as Ottoman-appointed princes in the Balkan periphery, or as linchpins in the Ottoman state apparatus itself, the Phanariotes were retrospectively cast as the very embodiment of “corruption”, yet, as shown by KONRAD PETROVSZKY (Vienna), also by contemporaries, when power-brokers’ patronage networks not only failed to protect them, but were themselves perceived as the root cause of transgressing the bounds of the acceptable. As MIHAI OLARU (Cluj-Napoca) demonstrated, however, Phanariot rule in the Principalities saw the gradual codification of rules defining certain practices as “corrupt”, as well as several semantic shifts in the attending legal vocabulary. The expansion of the state apparatus, of the areas in which the state could intervene, and the emergence of the “common good” as a topos which justified Phanariot rule all highlight the importance of taking into account historical perceptions of what was expected of (and what was deemed crucial to) the exercise of public office when attempting to historicise “corruption” as such. Conversely, focusing on the early-to-mid nineteenth century, CONSTANȚA VINTILǍ (Bucharest) showed how, at the tail-end of the Phanariot era, the continuity of patronage networks and the bureaucratic boom created by the process of ever-accelerating state-building allowed for upward mobility, early forms of capitalist accumulation – but also came with volatility and new avenues for denunciation. It is worth noting that both Petrovszky and Vintilǎ chose a microhistorical/biographical approach, which proved particularly useful in highlighting individual agency, the dynamics of network-building, and the intersecting scales at which corruption scandals played out.

At the other end of the spectrum, the conference also offered some stimulating reflections on the evolution of vocabularies of “corruption” over time, based on broad textual corpora, as illustrated by two papers focusing on Central Europe, by NIELS GRÜNE (Innsbruck) and MÁRIA PAKUCS (Bucharest). The former paper, focusing on the Duchy of Wuerttemberg between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, charted the diachronic evolution of terminology against the changing backdrop of a transition from feudal estates to absolutism, and to revolutionary Enlightenment perspectives. The latter paper, focusing on Saxon communities in Transylvania across a long eighteenth century, demonstrated how “Policeyordnungen” – a capacious category of normative acts meant to regulate the bounds of public conduct – functioned not merely as ways of “policing” moral codes of public virtue, but, over time, came to refer to what one might also more recognisably identify as “corruption” in a more modern sense. On both accounts, then, thinking about what the common good could mean within each political configuration and how the exercise of power could be thus justified or contested is a salutary reminder of the need to consider conceptual change within its social and political context, especially in the longue durée.

Even though “corruption” is often something that the modern(ising) state is eager to project onto an unenlightened past it claims to have superseded, the rise in literacy and the gradual extension of the public sphere that modernisation bring about make denunciation proliferate, as a form of systemic critique which challenges self-legitimising discourses of good rule. Two conference presentations focused on cases in which, in the post-Ottoman Balkans, new regimes of colonial rule were – in spite of the self-professed “civilising mission” of successor-states – attacked as “corrupt”. AUGUSTA DIMOU (Leipzig / Bucharest) reflected on the multidirectional deployment of “corruption” accusations by a variety of actors in Austro-Hungarian Bosnia and Herzegovina, while ANDREI-DAN SORESCU (Bucharest / London) focused on how administrative abuse in the newly-annexed Romanian province of Dobruja was alleged to act as a push factor for emigration. In line with recent historiographical developments which have shown how empires could engage in nation-building, just as nation-states could have imperial visions, the two papers focused on discourses of “corruption” as the flipside of “civilizing” narratives of good (colonial) rule as a comparable component across the former binary.

Finally, yet another set of complementary perspectives came to the fore when thinking about “corruption” was shown to be as relevant to processes of state-building, as it was to those of building networks across and beyond states. DAMJAN MATKOVIĆ (Regensburg) presented an analysis of how the vocabulary of “corruption” evolved in the context of institutional development in mid-nineteenth-century Serbia, at the intersection of personal rule and legal codification. SIMEON SIMEONOV (Sofia), conversely, examined the overlapping micropolitics of how the personal and professional aspirations of an Austrian consul helped carved out a space for jurisdictional claims, and political agency in an Ottoman periphery, with talk of “corruption” as part and parcel of how protection was extended (or not) to subjects in an age of revolutions. On either account, the inherently contested narrative of rooting out “corruption” as a legitimising driver for action proved crucial to institutional development, even if on vastly different scales – and to the vastly different ends of either creating a centralised nation-state or improvising an inter-imperial space of diplomatic surveillance and economic intelligence-gathering.

In sum, the conference successfully managed to offer a cross-section of the contexts in which, and the concepts or discourses through which “corruption” was historically imagined as a cause and effect. Spanning the analytical spectrum from the micro to the macro, the speakers – including the team members of the ERC-funded project of which this gathering was the first public event – covered significant ground by showcasing a truly diverse array of case studies. As the concluding debate of the conference also made plain, the language of “corruption” was not always explicit, just as “corruption” itself was not epiphenomenal, but central to how norms of governance and denunciation became more explicit in their historical contexts. It is with this in mind, then, that assembling a lexicon of “corruption” for the region and period in question presents itself as a much-needed next step.

Conference overview:

Session 1: Conceptualizing and (Re)defining ‘Corruption’

Chair and discussant: Silvia Marton (Bucharest)

Niels Grüne (Innsbruck): Early Modern Corruption Contextualized: Changing Notions of Misconduct in Office in Central and Western Europe

Alex R. Tipei (Montréal / Bucharest): From Tyranny to Corruption: Shifting Cross-Continental Discourses in the Age of Greek Independence

Boğaç Ergene (Burlington): Conceptualizing Corruption in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire: A Historiographic Reflection

Session 2: (Discursive) Conflicts of ‘Corruption’

Chair and discussant: Constantin Ardeleanu (Bucharest)

Constanța Vintilǎ (Bucharest): Questioning Excessive Wealth: On Abuse and Corruption in Moldavia (1800-1850)

Myrto Lamprou (Patra): Corruption and the Question of Non-Natives in the Greek Kingdom (1833-1862)

Augusta Dimou (Leipzig / Bucharest): Legality and Legitimacy. Conceptions of Legal Order in Post-Ottoman Bosnia

Session 3: Publicity, Morality, and ‘Corruption’

Chair and discussant: Elena Denisova-Schmidt (St. Gallen / Chestnut Hill)

Konrad Petrovszky (Vienna): Scandalizing Corruption in the 18th Century Ottoman Empire – the Case of the ‘Famous Greek Stavrakis’

Eda Güçlü (Vienna): Corruption and the Liberal Sentiments of Morality: Taxation and Property in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul

Session 4: Othering ‘Corruption’

Chair and discussant: Alex R. Tipei (Montréal / Bucharest)

Lucien Frary (Lawrence / Bucharest): Corruption in the Ottoman Balkans: Travel Accounts during the Age of Revolutions (1770-1848)

Simeon Simeonov (Sofia / Blagoevgrad): Corruption at the Consulate: Entangled Microhistories of the Lower Danube

Andrei-Dan Sorescu (Bucharest / London): ‘A Romanian Siberia’: Emigration, Corruption, and Ethnicity in an Internal Periphery

Session 5: Public Offices and Changing Regulatory Practices

Chair and discussant: Gábor Egry (Budapest)

Mária Pakucs (Bucharest): Policeywissenschaft in the Provinces: from Local Gute Policey to Central Policeyordnungen in Habsburg Transylvania

Mihai Olaru (Cluj-Napoca): Anticorruption from Above. Malfeasance, Reformism and Common Good in Late Eighteenth Century Wallachia

Damjan Matković (Regensburg): Formalization, Misuse and Corruption in Serbia (1838-1858)