Dirty Politics or "Harmonie"?: Defining Corruption in Early Modern Amsterdam and Hamburg

This article explores the ambiguities of corruption in the context of two early modern cities: Amsterdam and Hamburg. Both cities were, in the parlance of the time, republics and both were self-governing. In each city, as in early modern polities more generally, corruption was a fraught issue. Indeed, its very meaning defies easy definition. Nineteenth-century perceptions of "corruption" have greatly influenced the ways in which historians have located and spoken about corruption often to the detriment of grasping its contemporary significance. Even in cities such as Amsterdam and Hamburg, which had much in common, politics and therefore also corruption, differed. This close study of Amsterdam and Hamburg does not necessarily produce the material for a global model to understand corruption in the early modern world, or even in early modern "republics" more generally. Instead, it proposes a flexible framework that commands an approach rather than sets conclusions or offers predictability. It is furthermore a method predicated on a meticulous probing of peculiar circumstances, local practices, unique structures, and even personalities for as long as government remained (mostly) dependent on decisions made in individual cases and on individual events. In situations where the discrete existence of "private" and "public" goods and needs remained inchoate at best, and politicking remained highly individualized, modern definitions of corruption, forcefully shaped as they are by nineteenth-century historiography, can only lead us astray and cause us to miss or misinterpret their true historical value.