“It may, perhaps, be laid down as an invariable maxim, that the condition of the female part of society in any nation will furnish a tolerably just criterion of the degree of civilization to which that nation has arrived” (John Barrow, Travels in China [1804]). Toleration and pluralism were central tenets of the liberal culture that evolved over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But so, too, was an obsessive ranking of different cultures according to “the degree of civilization” they had attained, which would become, in turn, justification for an expansionist British trade and imperial policy. In this paper, I’ll be looking at the way nineteenth-century British liberal culture negotiated the challenges of an alien and what it took to be illiberal cultural practice in China – footbinding – and at the way this and other alien practices, and the attitude towards women they implied, allowed the British to de-humanise the Chinese, becoming part of the self-vindication and self-absolution of an imperial nation.