Public Money, Public Accounts, and Accountability

Trust carried within it a duty of accountability, not only to show that the trustee acted in the interests of the entrustor or beneficiary but also to account financially for moneys that an entrusted official handled. This chapter examines formal methods of accountability in an age of an expanding state and empire. The chapter highlights the ambiguities over how far officials could, legally and morally, profit from public money in their hands and hence whether ‘abuse’ of public money constituted ‘corruption’. The failures of good oversight in the corporations and both the domestic and imperial contexts are stressed. The analysis then turns to the development and (at times transformative) influence of public accounts committees and commissions, beginning in the mid-seventeenth-century revolution. Throughout, the emphasis is on how long the process of achieving formal accountability took and the slow change of mentalities behind the regulatory innovations.