A Comparative Historical Sociology of Corruption

This volume renews the study of corruption as ‘embedded’ in ongoing social relations. Instead of treating corruption as a universal phenomenon, A Comparative Historical Sociology of Corruption shows how corruption is often morally ambiguous and deeply intertwined with the social, political and economic struggles of particular groups in specific times and places. Ranging from Early Modernity to the present day, and spanning across the globe, the book focuses on three recurring aspects of corruption: emergence or the origins and struggles over whether something is corrupt; institutionalization or how different definitions of corruption predominate; and mobilization or the sociopolitical functions that different definitions of corruption serve in times of social change. The volume includes a wide variety of historical and contemporary studies to show that corruption is embedded in its context, providing a novel framework for readers to understand how and why corruption persists across time and place.

Author Biography

Marco Garrido is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila (2019). Marina Zaloznaya is Associate Professor of Criminology at Arizona State University and Executive Director of Corruption in the Global South Research Consortium. Her research explores political, gender and network dimensions of corruption in non-democracies. She is the author of The Politics of Bureaucratic Corruption (2017). Nicholas Hoover Wilson is Associate Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Modernity’s Corruption: Empire, Morality, and the Making of British India (2023), which traces how the category of corruption shifted within the English East India Company.