Throughout history, public corruption has been endemic. Exceptionally, it was significantly suppressed in modern times in northwestern Europe. Why did that happen? Why did politicians introduce measures that acted against their own interests? And are the political forces that then induced reform alive in today's world? Neild explores these highly topical questions by looking at the suppression of corruption in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in four countries – France, Germany, Britain and the USA; at the evolution of independent judiciaries; at developments in the twentieth century, including a reminder of how widely corruption was used as a weapon in the Cold War, particularly in the Third World. Finally, and most devastatingly, he analyses the rise and decline in standards of public life in Britain in the twentieth century.

Robert Neild is a retired Professor of Economics and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. During a career that included two spells in Whitehall and also spells in India, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA, working on many areas of policy, he became interested in problems of public administration, including corruption.

Ch1 - Introduction; Ch2 - General; Ch3 - Prussia/Germany; Ch4 - France; Ch5 - The United States; Ch6 - Britain in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries; Ch7 - Britain's Indian Connection; Ch8 - The Evolution of Independent Judiciaries; Ch9 - The Twentieth Century; Ch10 - Britain in the First Half of the Twentieth Century; Ch11 - Britain in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century; Ch12 - Recapitulation and Conclusion; Appendices; Notes; Index