Mark Knights is Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Warwick. He works on the political culture of early modern Britain and its empire c.1550 - c.1850 with particular interests in the history of corruption in Britain. He worked for the History of Parliament on its 1690-1715 volumes and has appeared in a number of TV and radio programmes, including Who Do You Think You Are? and BBC Radio 4's In Our Time. His most recent publications are Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and its Empire 1600-1850 (OUP, 2021) and Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (OUP, 2005).
In tonight’s lecture he will examine Britain’s long struggle with corruption, showing how it evolved from the 17th to the 19th centuries to impact every level of the British Empire, and what can be learned from it today; he will show that corruption and scandal, from the acceptance of bribes to tax evasion, and the unscrupulous individuals involved in them are not a peculiar phenomenon of modern life!