ABSTRACT
Perhaps paradoxically, colonial history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was highly critical about the practices of European colonial expansion. Much of this criticism was written either by Scottish philosophers and historians observing the European colonial experience from Britain or Scottish orientalists who worked within the British East India Company. These Scottish writers included Adam Smith, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, Walter Scott and James Mill, to name a few, but also East India Company officials such as Colin Mackenzie, John Malcolm, John Leyden, Mountstuart Elphinstone, Joseph Hume and John Crawfurd as well as many others. 1 Yet, despite the centrality of critical philosophers and historians, the criticism of colonial practice also presented a moral contradiction between the control necessary for empire and the ideal of advancing freedom.
