Critical historians read moralizing uplift as strategic political contrivance.

Evidence

Echoing Bernard Shaw in his 1907 play Major Barbara, students of colonialism have waged political assault on such moralizing missions and their “do-good” bourgeoisies, mocking “uplift” projects and their redemptionseeking advocates. Impatient with benevolent, sentimental imperialisms— both U.S. and European variants—and their self-serving justifications, critical historians have looked more to the “rational” categories “behind” moral panics, to the irrationalities of rule, to pathos as a political contrivance of the strategic disciplinary social reforms that followed. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 371