The aim of the workshop is to bring together people working on more analytical approaches to corruption in relation to markets and forms of exchange with those engaged in the historical study of trading organisations in the early modern period. We plan to bring together analytic questions associated with corruption such as concerns about the character of markets, types of exchange, norms of reciprocity, and principal-agent issues about whose interest is to be served with, with, from the historical point of view, issues about conceptions of fair trading, the status of private trade, norms of probity, the range of legitimate expectations individuals engaged in the trade might have had, and the impact of trading organisations with their own states.

Mark Philp and Mark Knights