Abstract
Two nineteenth-century cases in the Gujarati princely state of Baroda shed light on the politics of corruption. The first, running from the mid-1830s to mid-1850s, centred on allegations about the corrupt influence (known as ‘khutput’) of a native clique on the East Indian Company hierarchy; the second, in 1893–1895, turned on allegations against Vasudev Sadashew Bapat, an allegedly corrupt official in a department dealing with sensitive land revenue issues. The responses by the British authorities were different in the two cases. In the first, the Bombay hierarchy proved very resistant to challenging khutput despite the vigorous investigatory efforts of one of its own officials, James Outram. In the second, the British authorities were keen to intervene and brought the matter to trial. These differing approaches were nevertheless united by a common desire to maintain maximum influence over the nominally-independent state.
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Knights, M., Leonard, Z. (2021). Bribery in Baroda: The Politics of Corruption in Nineteenth-Century India. In: Kroeze, R., Dalmau, P., Monier, F. (eds) Corruption, Empire and Colonialism in the Modern Era. Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0255-9_6
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