Introduction --
Strategies: liberal conventions and imperial exclusions --
Progress, civilization, and consent --
Liberalism, empire, and territory --
Edmund Burke on the perils of the empire --
Experience and unfamiliarity.

We take liberalism to be a set of ideas committed to political rights and self-determination, yet it also served to justify an empire built on political domination. Uday Mehta argues that imperialism, far from contradicting liberal tenets, in fact stemmed from liberal assumptions about reason and historical progress. Confronted with unfamiliar cultures such as India, British liberals could only see them as backward