Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Modernity's corruption and the art of separation -- Shifting grounds : the transformation of the East India Company -- Consequential reforms and changing corruption -- Modern selves -- Modern moral spaces.

"Modernity's Corruption is rooted in a case study of the British East India Company's rise to territorial power in South Asia between the middle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It develops a novel explanation for the transition between two concepts of corruption. The first, that corruption is the loss of balance of competing passions within one's self. One could be corrupted when greed overcomes pride. The second, and more modern one, is putting one's personal interests ahead of the group. Nicholas Hoover Wilson argues that the transition between the two forms of corruption was the unintended consequence of a bitter conflict among British East India Company officials and the changing audiences to which they justified themselves in Britain. As audiences to the conflicts within the Company began to include those unfamiliar with the details of administration, new justifications for officials' behavior shaped a unified sense of moral selfhood among administrators, defining the ethical boundaries of state, society, and economy. In short, the book identified the emergence of a moral boundary that has governed behavior within modern bureaucratic organizations ever since"-- Provided by publisher.