Beck’s Risk Society surveyed the present and tried to delineate the outlines of a future society under ‘the new modernity’. In doing so however, it drew heavily on broad brush statements about the past including the landscape of feudal and early modern societies. In this chapter we explore some of Beck’s main ideas through a historical lens focused on maternity care in both the UK and colonised India, a particularly revealing site of encounter between western midwifery and non-western traditions and practices. We argue that ideas of risk that became ubiquitous in late twentieth-century discourse are closely tied to colonial concepts of cultural difference. Our work reconsiders and advances Beck’s key ideas, including the development of science and medicine as concomitant to ideas of risk; the growth of individualisation and choice and its implications for maternity; and the idea that uncertainty is the key driver in the maternity experience.