Introduction

‘Moderates' have not met with favour even outside the fold of nationalist history writing: they were blamed by Marxist historians for their bourgeois individualism and paternalism in the 1960s and 1970s; they were considered ‘collaborators' and more interested in getting a share of imperial power rather than achieving the welfare of the nation by the Cambridge school. The emerging picture is that, far from being passive recipients of Western knowledge and ideology or “products of fields of power,” A rich and sophisticated literature has over the years highlighted how liberalism, with its focus on abstract universal rights and principles of neutrality, has made invisible inequalities of power such as relations between genders or social classes. The scholarship dealing with colonial settings has shown that liberalism revealed its most exclusionary face and became a powerful ideological weapon in the hands of the colonial rulers who justified their domination with the ‘difference’ and ‘inferiority’ of the colonised.