Informal Accountability, Distrust, and Speaking Out

2021 ◽  
pp. 228-260
Author(s):  
Mark Knights
Keyword(s):  
East India Company ◽  
Public Accountability ◽  
Speaking Out ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Informal Accountability ◽  
Do So ◽  
Legal Processes

Accountability did not operate solely through formal audits, institutions or legal processes; informal and public forms of accountability were also particularly important, not least as a pressure on Parliament, the East India Company and other institutions (often themselves seen as corrupt), to increase their oversight of officers. Such public accountability could take many forms but the chapter focuses on people (often officials themselves) who made public revelations when they felt that formal accountability mechanisms had failed. These men might now be called ‘whistle-blowers’ but in the pre-modern period their behaviour struggled to achieve legitimacy. The chapter surveys the variety of their motives and shows how they fought to expose and remedy corruption, often using print to do so, before sketching the negative ways in which their institutions reacted to their complaints and publicity.

scholarly journals Merchants and States: Private Trade and the Fall of Madras, 1746

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Søren Mentz
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The State ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Economic Surplus ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Private Entrepreneurs ◽  
British State

Michael Pearson has argued that “rights for revenue” was an important element in the European way of organizing long-distance trade in the early modern period. The state provided indigenous merchant groups with commercial privileges and allowed them to influence political affairs. In return, the state received a part of the economic surplus. The East India Company and the British state shared such a relationship. However, as this article demonstrates, the East India Company was not an impersonal entity. It consisted of many layers of private entrepreneurs, who pursued their own private interests sheltered by the Company’s privileged position. One such group was the Company servants in Asia. The French conquest of Madras in 1746 and the following period of British sub-imperialism in India demonstrate that the state had traded off too many rights. Through the business papers of Willian Monson, a senior Company servant in Madras, the historian can describe the fall of Madras as a consequence of deteriorating relationships between private interests within the Company structure. Directors, shareholders, Company servants and private merchants in India fell out with each other. In this situation, the British state found it difficult to intervene.

Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher T. Fleming
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Personal Law ◽  
Philosophical Understanding

An account of theories of ownership (svatva) and inheritance (dāya) in Sanskrit jurisprudential literature (Dharmaśāstra). This book examines the evolution of different?juridical models of inheritance—in which families held property in trusts or in tenancies-in-common—against the backdrop of related developments in the philosophical understanding of ownership in the Sanskrit text-traditions of hermeneutics (Mīmāṃsā) and logic (Nyāya) respectively. Ownership and Inheritance reconstructs medieval Sanskrit theories of property and traces the emergence of various competing schools of Sanskrit jurisprudence during the early modern period (roughly fifteenth to nineteenth centuries) in Bihar, Bengal, and Varanasi. The book attends to the ways in which ideas from these schools of jurisprudence shaped the codification of Anglo-Hindu personal law by administrators of the British East India Company during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While acknowledging the limitations of colonial conceptions of Dharmaśāstra as positive law, Ownership and Inheritance argues for far greater continuity between pre-colonial and colonial Sanskrit jurisprudence than accepted previously. Finally, this monograph charts the transformation of the Hindu law of inheritance—through precedent and statute—over the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries.

scholarly journals Mixed Company in the Contact Zone: the “Glocal” Diplomatic Efforts of a Prussian East Indiaman in 1750s Cape Verde

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 423-441
Author(s):  
Felicia Gottmann
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Contact Zone ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cape Verde ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Northern European ◽  
Modern Period

Abstract This article takes a micro-historical actor-centered approach to study the encounter between the officers of a Prussian East India Company Ship and local elites in 1750s Praia, Cape Verde. Combining recent advances in New Diplomatic History and in Company Studies with insights from the study of Contact Zones and transculturation, it analyzes the diplomatic strategies marginalized and hybrid players could adopt to project themselves onto the early modern global stage and locally counterbalance the hegemonic Northern European Atlantic powers. It thus proposes an alternative model of nonprofessional diplomatic interaction in the early modern period.

Media and public accountability: typology and research agenda

2019 ◽  
pp. 33-52
Author(s):  
Sandra Jacobs ◽  
Thomas Schillemans
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Public Accountability ◽  
The Media ◽  
Public Organisations ◽  
Informal Accountability

The role of the media in public accountability has often been discussed. This is especially the case for public sector organisations, whose accountability relations have changed in the shift from government to governance. In this paper, we develop a typology of the ways mass media are involved in public accountability processes. Media can stimulate actors to reflect on their behaviour, trigger formal accountability by reporting on the behaviour of actors, amplify formal accountability as they report on it or act as an independent and informal accountability forum. To explore the presence of these roles in practice, we focus on public sector organisations in the Netherlands. Our quantitative and qualitative analysis in the Netherlands suggests that the media primarily serve an indirect role in public accountability, either by invoking pre-emptive self-criticism in public organisations in anticipation of potential media scrutiny or by triggering formal accountability demands from MPs

Young Russians are increasingly prepared to protest

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Due Process ◽  
The State ◽  
Age Group ◽  
Content Type ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Speaking Out ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Younger Age ◽  
Do So

Significance Although Ustinov, 23, says he was not even part of the demonstration, his case became a cause celebre pointing to a gulf between the Kremlin and the people, particularly a younger generation that seems less fearful of speaking out. The court's unusual step reflects concerns that the case against Ustinov is fabricated, and that tough action against protesters compounded with indifference to due process risks a loss of legitimacy for the state. Impacts Russians, including the young, are losing trust in state institutions across the board. Many in the younger age-group are considering emigration, and have the personal and other resources to do so. Environmental protests are more likely to be given official authorisation than political events.

Scripture and Society in Modern Muslim Asia—A Symposium Introduction

1993 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 559-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Bowen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Education ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Muslim Men ◽  
Do So

Since the late nineteenth century, Muslim movements for religious and social reform have underscored the value of making scripture accessible to a broad public. Scholars and activists alike have urged ordinary Muslim men and women to study and follow the Qur'ān and the hadīth (the reports of the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds), and to do so they have rendered these scriptural writings and commentaries on them into the vernaculars of Asia, Africa, and Europe. They have also framed a wide range of appeals—to study the sciences, to modernize society, to stage a revolution—in the language and format of scriptural commentary. Vernacular writings (and, more recently, audio and videocassettes) based on scripture provide the foundations of popular religious education (Shahrani 1991), figure prominently in political movements (Fischer 1980; Kepel 1985), and serve as guides for living for Muslims traveling outside their homelands (Kepel 1987). The modern period has seen an explosion in the range of languages, genres, and contexts in which Muslims have authoritatively deployed scripture.

Trust and Distrust

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Knights
Keyword(s):  
Distinctive Feature ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Long Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Large Readership ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Imperial State ◽  
Do So

The book offers the first overview of Britain’s history of corruption in office in the pre-modern era, 1600–1850. As such, it is intended to appeal to historians but also to political and social scientists, whose work is extensively cited in an expansive and evaluative bibliography. Another distinctive feature of the book is the interaction of the domestic and imperial stories of corruption in office—a key argument is that these were intertwined and related. Linking corruption in office to the domestic and imperial state has not been attempted before, and the book makes extensive use of material 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 evolving concepts during the period 1600–1850 and underwent very significant but protracted change which the book charts and seeks to explain. To do so, 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 of officials. The reader’s report suggested that ‘no historian of this long period can afford to ignore the book, and it will certainly appeal to a large readership not only among historians of Britain and its empire but among political scientists more generally’. There is a brief concluding section highlighting policy implications.

Recht zur Intervention – Pflicht zur Intervention?

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Responsibility To Protect ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Contractual Relationships ◽  
The Right ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

The responsibility to protect and intervention possessed a central political importance in the early modern period. This volume asks whether there was also a duty to intervene alongside the right to do so. This draws attention to the relationship between the responsibility to protect, security and reputation, which is the focus of the contributions the book contains. Chronologically, they range from the 15th to the 18th centuries and discuss monarchical duties to protect, alliance commitments, confessional legitimation and motives, as well as those based on patronage, contractual relationships and electoral processes. One of the book’s important findings is a deeper understanding of reputation, which is comprehensively examined here as a political guiding factor with reference to changing understandings of security for the first time.

Witsen's World: Nicolaas Witsen (1641–1717) between the Dutch East India Company and the Republic of Letters

Itinerario ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
P.J.A.N. Rietbergen
Keyword(s):  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Do So ◽  
At Home

In a collection of essays concerning the inevitably diverse vicissitudes of the representatives of that phenomenon collectively known as ‘the Company's servants,’ the inclusion of Nicolaas Witsen may come as a surprise. In our democratic age, he undoubtedly would have termed himself a ‘servant’ of the Dutch East India Company; in his own, more hierarchical times, he will have considered himself one of the Company's masters, as indeed he was. Whatever the powers of the Heren XVII may actually have been, Witsen for many years was one of the directors of the Amsterdam Chamber, the Company's most powerful division, and one of Amsterdam representatives to the bi-annual assembly which actually directed the Company's affairs at home, and tried to do so abroad, in its far-flung commercial empire, where other servants often held far greater, and less controlable power.

The East India Company and the island of Johanna (Anjouan) during the long eighteenth century

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-233
Author(s):  
H. V. Bowen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Direct Control ◽  
Mozambique Channel ◽  
Maritime Operations ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Maritime Infrastructure ◽  
Do So

For just over 230 years the East India Company’s maritime operations were supported by a far-flung network of islands, ports and watering points across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. These places provided supplies to company ships and safe havens in times of danger. The island of Johanna, or Anjouan, in the Mozambique Channel was one such place and this article considers how it came to be a key component within the company’s maritime system. The article also examines why the company chose not to exert direct control over the island when it had the opportunity to do so at the end of the eighteenth century. It is concluded that Johanna formed an important part of the flexible and durable maritime infrastructure that underpinned the territorial empire constructed by the company in India from 1750 onwards.

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