LEADING HISTORIANS have criticised Gordon Brown for "glorification" of the British Empire, and claim the government repeated in Iraq mistakes made with India.

At a lecture in Edinburgh tonight, the award-winning Scottish author William Dalrymple will caution that exulting the old empire is a thin veil for justifying "contemporary imperial projects such as Iraq and Afghanistan".

Meanwhile, Maria Misra, lecturer in modern history at Oxford University and a speaker at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, criticised Brown for refusing to apologise for the British Empire when empires "by definition often damage societies".

Their warnings come as events around the UK celebrate the 60th year of Indian independence and also commemorate the 150th anniversary of the 1857 Indian Uprising. Dalrymple's talk is part of a conference on the 1857 Mutiny at the Margins, organised by Edinburgh University's Centre for South Asian Studies.

Brown said, on a trip to Africa in 2005, that the "days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over". He explained: "We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it. And we should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history: tolerance, liberty, civic duty, that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world. Our strong traditions of fair play, of openness, of internationalism, these are great British values."

However, some historians believe that this celebratory attitude might gloss over particular ongoing problems of former colonies, when governments could learn from past mistakes.

Misra - whose modern history of India, Vishnu's Crowded Temple, will be published in August - said she thought Brown's rhetoric was worrying. "I am surprised to have a revival of imperial ideas coming from Brown as he is an intelligent person and a historian," she said. "I think it is partly because Brown wants to unify Britain that he focuses on the empire. The problem with that is where it leaves people like me, the descendants of black immigrants. They are going to be left thinking: were we only civilized because these helpful Scots went out and took us in hand?"

She said that there might be other motives for praising empires. "Britain's international reputation has been damaged by being involved in the Iraq imbroglio, so Britain might have a reason for some soft-pedalling on the imperial theme."

Her book suggests that the British Empire increased division, religious tension and oppression rather than creating stable societies and democracies.

"Empires almost by definition - not because they are evil or badly intended - often damage societies quite badly. They team up with what they think of as the dominant groups when they take over, such as religious leaders and people with a lot of wealth. Rather than trying to spread the benefits of development and education, they concentrate on governing through these inter- mediaries - developing ideas of cultural and ethnic difference which justified the rule."

Misra said the British Empire helped establish sharia law and the caste system. "An odd combination of British and Islamic scholarship developed a hardened idea of sharia law. There is no such thing as a single set of Muslim laws in 1808, but there sure is in 1930 because it has been propagated by a colonial estate desperate to understand a state over which it has quite thin powers.

"The same thing happens with the idea of the caste system - it doesn't have anything like what we think of as the rigid system, from the brahmin to the untouchables. If it exists at all, it is in a small part of India and probably disappearing."

The lessons were there to be learned for Iraq, she said. "The book is trying to get people to think about the complexity of colonial legacies and to be less susceptible to what seem like easy solutions.

"What has happened in Iraq is a kind of capsulised version and much worse, than what happened in India. One can see Iraq heading towards partition, just as India was in 1947, because the leading groups of Muslim and Hindu society had begun to feel they couldn't live with each other. It wasn't necessarily going to have to be that way, but empires work to exacerbate those feelings of difference."

William Dalrymple, who this year published the award-winning The Last Mughal, said that the Tudors going to India were like Poles coming to Britain today - it was wealthy, rich, self-confident and in the midst of an artistic renaissance. But, he said, the Moghal empire was destroyed by the British, in a period that proves the negative effects of imperialism.

"I think from our contemporary perspective, it is clearly wrong for one country to impose its will on another," he said. "The great danger when people glorify empire is that it provides legitimacy to contemporary imperial projects such as Iraq and Afghanistan."

Photographs from the 19th century in India are on show at a Scottish National Portrait Gallery exhibition that opened yesterday. John Falconer, curator of photographs at the British Library and guest curator, said that a subtle imperial bias can sometimes be detected.

"Photographers such as Samuel Bourne primarily took landscapes but his writings reflect, almost with a sense of ownership, to validate the imperial position," he said.

A spokeswoman for 10 Downing Street said that Brown's position on the British Empire remains the same as the comments he made, in their proper context, in 2005, and in a subsequent interview with The Voice.