A recurring concern of the essays is the history of labour but, as Jennifer Davis notes in her Introduction, Raj never saw himself as a labour historian. He viewed society, culture and politics in their widest terms and on the basis of a stunning breadth of reading, and he was never afraid to engage with contemporary issues in the course of exploring the past. However, his perspective was firmly rooted to a particular point, revealed in a phrase which occurs on several occasions in these essays: that a society is to be judged by how it treats its poorest and weakest members. It is hard to argue with that judgement.

The essays take up many discrete questions, but Raj delighted in debate and came back repeatedly to three sets of issues where he hoped that his interventions would be telling. The first of these concerned the status of universal social theories and, especially, the theory of ‘modernization’. Raj entered academic life in the 1970s when the optimism which had attended the ‘liberation’ of the former European colonies was already beginning to dissipate. Naively, it had been supposed that, freed from their colonial shackles, they would rapidly ‘develop’ along the same course as the societies of their erstwhile masters – towards liberty, prosperity and democracy, which represented the ineluctable destiny of the whole of humankind. And, in so far as they did not, it was the result of failings within themselves, peculiarities which ‘obstructed’ or ‘arrested’ their passage to progress.