How to See Corruption: Networks and the Construction of Corruption in Spanish Italy

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the practices and structures of corruption in Spanish Italy and demonstrates how the forms of official conduct that would later be categorized as corrupt in eighteenth-century political and legal discourses were already understood and prosecuted as corruption in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through the intervention at the local level of the visita, an institution employed by the Spanish Crown to inspect officials. The notion of corruption that was useful to the state amalgamated forms of conduct corresponding to distinctive configurations of social structures that functioned like networks. This article examines for the first time the rich collection of depositions assembled by the visitas in Naples and Sicily in 1559, 1581, and 1606, and reproduces four networks of corruption. Through the use of network analysis, these networks point to two foundational structural models of early modern corruption in which officials participated at the local level: a corrupt clientelism typified by relationships of exchange and favor organized by officials and a corruption of partiality and abuse of discretion embedded within institutional work and processes. Although distinct, these models were conceptually linked through the perception that these networks benefitted particular interests and were critically drawn together through the surveillance and discipline provided by the visita in anticipation of anti-corruption ideology and modern bureaucratic norms. What the state saw through the visita and prosecuted as corrupt reflected how that corruption was reported, how it occurred, and how it was structured.