Postcolonialists, over the past 35 years, have called for a dramatic change in the way colonialism is approached. The central concern is with the narrative of modernity. Modernity has both temporal and geographical dimensions. The temporal concerns rupture – the idea that at some point in time something happened to western societies which transformed them from pre-modern into modern societies. The Renaissance, the French Revolution and the industrial revolution form the key pillars of this story, together facilitating the Enlightenment, the emergence of democracy and the rise of capitalism in the West (Bhambra, 2007). This narrative reaffirms the idea that some places in the world are today modern, while some are not. Combined with the temporal variable, this logically means that some societies are ‘behind’ western societies, existing in their past rather than in a global present. Modernity is therefore commonly theorised as simultaneously distinctive and Western European in its origins. What is interesting for our case is that postcolonial scholars often generalise about Europe, implying that the whole continent might be subsumed into their critique. And yet not all of Europe pursued representative democracy, capitalism or human rights (key indicators of modernity) at the same point in time as the ‘western core’. This peripherality to conceptions of modernity raises interesting questions for sociology in postsocialist spaces.