The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

So said Edmund Burke in 1784 -- and he is accounted as a great conservative.

Re reading Burke though I'm not convinced -- a better view might be that he was a conservative liberal -- and indeed he was seen as being on the blue side (to use a term not in use then) of the Whigs. Perhaps put differently, conservative or not, much of what he said has value; the politics of a person do not always define the value of their thinking.

His respect for the history and traditions of India, and his condemnation of the damage he believed the East India Company had done to India is far from the concept of a modern Imperialist.

Speaking on February 28, 1785 on The Nabob of Arcot's Debts he emphasized the worth of Indian achievement and the failure of the East India Company:

These [Indian waterworks] are the monuments of real kings, who were the fathers of their people; testators to a posterity which they embraced as their own. These are the grand sepulchres built by ambition; but by the ambition of an insatiable benevolence, which, not contented with reigning in the dispensation of happiness during the contracted term of human life, had strained, with all the reachings and graspings of a vivacious mind, to extend the dominion of their bounty beyond the limits of nature, and to perpetuate themselves through generations of generations, the guardians, the protectors, the nourishers of mankind.

Burke held that the advent of British dominion, and in particular the conduct of the East India Company had destroyed much that was good in Indian traditions and that, as a consequence of this, and the lack of new customs to replace them, the Indians were suffering.