Ricard Torra-Prat: Conceptualising corruption in Early Modern times: the local perspective within the age of global narratives

The number of publications concerning the issue of political corruption from a historical perspective has been growing quite substantially during the last decades. By joining a path toured extensively by other fields of knowledge such as political sciences or legal studies, historians have analysed questions including the methods that societies from the past had for preventing corrupt practices, the function of corruption within a given society, countless case studies, and most recently, the impact of corruption within the colonial rule. However, one area that has received less attention deals with the concept of corruption in past societies. Thus, my presentation debates a new three-dimensional methodology to overcome the difficulties of defining historical corruption. A first dimension deals with the geographical perspective, emphasising the importance of a local contextualisation of the language related to corruption practices; a second dimension discusses the existence of divergent Sattelzeiten among different societies and political realities; finally, a third dimension debates how a social history of the usage of a broad vocabulary trackable throughout a wide range of historical sources can help us reconstruct the concept of corruption in pre-modern societies.

• Zeit: 17-19 Uhr c.t.
• Ort: Amalienstr. 52, Raum K 402