The study of corruption during the Old Regime (mid-16^th century to the mid-19^th century) in Southeastern Europe has to face a deep-rooted prejudice and a blunt reality. On the one hand, the idea that institutions and public employees are exceptionally corrupt and that corruption is somehow inherent to the region’s culture and impossible to stamp out pervades much of public discourse. For example, when this project was advertised in the Romanian mass media, a journalist called the author and asked to do an interview on the roots of corruption in Romania. The underlying assumption was that corruption runs like a red thread throughout Romanian history, and it suffices to go back in time to find its origins. In addition, the invitation seemed to omit the multiple and significant changes that took place during the last three hundred years as well as the diversity of political and administrative traditions that preceded the making of modern Romania. On the other hand, the presence of corruption and its negative effects in the life of citizens cannot be denied. Thus, one can ask what the benefits of studying this phenomenon in the early-modern period would be since, it is believed, it continues undisturbed for centuries.1 Can one learn something from the history of corruption? Can we understand it better? Or are there lessons from the past that will help us deal with corruption in the present? The ancient dictum historia magistra vitae has been discarded by historians long ago as a reason to study history. Since history consists of singular events, as the modern concept of history holds, the past can serve no lessons for the present or future. Nevertheless, by studying the history of corruption, we can better understand what it meant in the past, how it changed and how people – governors and civil society – tried to control it. We can gain no direct instructions, but we can get better ideas. And here are a few reasons why I think such a complex phenomenon as corruption is worth studying.

History of corruption in Wallachia

Historians of corruption in the early-modern world tell us that, far from being reserved to some regions and cultures, activities which we regard today as corrupt – trading of influence, favouritism, use of “public” office for “private” gain, gifts to those in power etc. – were commonplace. Several features of the early-modern societies favoured such a state of affairs. Officials were recruited through patronage and received no salaries, which meant that they drew their revenues from the exploitation of their offices, a legitimate behaviour. The blurred dividing line between private and public only encouraged the latter situation. Not least, officials had to navigate between competing norms, like the loyalty towards the institution, the allegiance towards his family or patron and religious identity. This alone is enough to dispel the essentialist notion of corruption as an inborn characteristic of a culture/society/region.

The same situation is documented in Wallachia, during the 17^th and early 18th century. Administrative malpractice was treated on a case-by-case basis and was framed as disloyalty or debt to the prince. Several cases of embezzlement and abuses from the 17^th century are documented, the most famous one from 1695, involving the clucer (official responsible for the provisioning of the princely court ) Constantin Ştirbei. The latter took bribes, mis-assessed the taxes due by tax-payers and embezzled money from the tax he was entrusted to collect. But the prince accused him of being ingrate (for the favours the prince bestowed on him) and disloyal.

This situation began to change in the second half of the 18^th century when the Phanariot princes of Wallachia introduced a series of reforms meant to improve administration, taxation and justice and to put on a legal basis the relations between dependent peasants and their landlords. The reforms inaugurated a new style of government, one based on the issuing of frequent ordinances which regulated in detail, among other aspects, the duties and rights of the office-holders. It is in these regulations that a preoccupation with the office-holders’(mis)conduct surfaces. Let us take, for example, the office of the head of border district (vătaf de plai). Numerous ordinances establish the responsibilities and rights of these officials, including their pay, and warn them to refrain from abuses. The stipulations of these ordinances are inserted in the letters of appointment. In 1785 the head of the Arefu border district (Argeş county) was accused of establishing illegal sources of income, of acting beyond his jurisdiction and of committing various other abuses. Thus, the crimes he was accused of came in direct contradiction to the princely regulations. In other cases, these regulations are even cited or quoted.

This was due to a large extent to the particular situation of Wallachia with regard to the Ottoman Empire as a tributary principality, a relation which brought an ever-mounting fiscal pressure. Moreover, the frequent wars between the three neighbouring empires (Habsburg, Tsarist, Ottoman) generated periods of economic and demographic crises which determined attempts from the part of the rulers to overhaul the administration and impose stricter rules of conduct in office. Hence, far from the image of a society in which corruption is a perennial and nonproblematic phenomenon favoured by the culture of that society, we witness a shift in the way malfeasance is understood and a concern with it. Of course, this does not necessarily imply success in keeping corruption in check or reducing it. However, the transformation of how corruption was understood is significant.

Why do we need corruption studies?

The historical study of corruption and anticorruption also warns us against too optimistic expectations. Curbing bribery or other corrupt activities on numerous factors, usually a combination thereof. Some of these factors that scholars invoke are an adequate legal frame, a free press, a transparent and incentivising remuneration for officials, efficient monitoring and political resolve, among others. In addition, the working of these favourable factors is a protracted process and depends on the historical experience of various countries. Thus, the experience of one country that successfully managed to control corruption cannot be easily transferred to another historical configuration. Alternatively, historians like Jens Ivo Engels claim that corruption was not so much an objective fact of the pre-industrial societies that some modern societies managed to control. Corruption has to be seen rather as a constructed phenomenon having to do with the modern tendency to fight ambiguity, a goal that, in his view, is bound to fail due to the complexity of social reality. At most, Jens Ivo Engels concedes that success in curbing corruption in particular fields at particular times does not imply general success. On the contrary, success in controlling corruption can, in turn, engender other forms of corruption.

* This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 898155.

1 I am referring here rather to a widely shared belief and do not deny the constant molding of informality by the state.

Further Literature:

Kroeze, R.; Vitória, A.; and Geltner, G. eds., Anticorruption in History. From Antiquity to the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Kettering, S.; Patrons, Brokers, and Clients, 192-206. For the previous century, N. Z. Davies, The Gift in the Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000).

Knights, M. Trust and Distrust. Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire, 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).