ABSTRACT
The civilizing mission has been traditionally seen as an ideology by which late-nineteenth-century Europeans rationalized their colonial domination of the rest of humankind. Formulations of this ideology varied widely, from those of thinkers or colonial administrators who stressed the internal pacification and political order that European colonization extended to ‘barbaric’ and ‘savage’ peoples suffering from incessant warfare and despotic rule, to those of missionaries and reformers who saw religious conversion and education as the keys to European efforts to ‘uplift’ ignorant and backward peoples. But by the late nineteenth century, most of the fully elaborated variations on the civilizing mission theme were grounded in presuppositions that suggest that it had become a good deal more than a way of salving the consciences of those engaged in the imperialist enterprise. Those who advocated colonial expansion as a way of promoting good government, economic improvement or Christian proselytization, agreed that a vast and ever-widening gap had opened between the level of development achieved by Western European societies (and their North American offshoots) and that attained by any of the other peoples of the globe. Variations on the civilizing mission theme became the premier means by which European politicians and colonial officials, as well as popularizers and propagandists, identified the areas of human endeavour in which European superiority had been incontestably established and calibrated the varying degrees to which different non-European societies lagged behind those of Western Europe. Those who contributed to the civilizing mission discourse, whether through official policy statements or in novels and other fictional works, also sought to identify the reasons for Europe’s superior advance relative to African backwardness or Asian stagnation, and the implications of these findings for international relations and colonial policy.
