Thanks to Joe Hardwick for sending this unsavoury extract from Charles Grant, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain (1792, printed 1813). Integrity is glossed as ‘conscientious in the whole of his conduct’.

Grant’s suggestion that in a context in which ‘distrust is awake in all transactions’ the man of integrity is ‘to be feared ‘ is an interesting observation. It seems right that when the expectation is that everyone will cheat and lie a person who acts with integrity appears freakish and (paradoxically) untrustworthy.