Informal Accountability, Distrust, and Speaking Out

Accountability did not operate solely through formal audits, institutions or legal processes; informal and public forms of accountability were also particularly important, not least as a pressure on Parliament, the East India Company and other institutions (often themselves seen as corrupt), to increase their oversight of officers. Such public accountability could take many forms but the chapter focuses on people (often officials themselves) who made public revelations when they felt that formal accountability mechanisms had failed. These men might now be called ‘whistle-blowers’ but in the pre-modern period their behaviour struggled to achieve legitimacy. The chapter surveys the variety of their motives and shows how they fought to expose and remedy corruption, often using print to do so, before sketching the negative ways in which their institutions reacted to their complaints and publicity.