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Contested Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission Ideology
Michael Adas
Rutgers University
| 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 1800s, 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 endeavor 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. |
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Much of the civilizing mission discourse was obviously self-serving. But the perceived gap between western Europe's material development and that of the rest of the world appeared to validate the pronouncements of the colonial civilizers. Late Victorians were conviced that the standards by which they gauged their superiority and justified their global hegemony were both empirically verifiable and increasingly obvious. Before the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, these measures of human achievement were contested only by dissident (and marginalized) intellectuals, and occasionally by disaffected colonial officials. The overwhelming majority of thinkers and political leaders who concerned themselves with colonial issues had little doubt that the scientific and industrial revolutions—at that point still confined to Europe and North America—had elevated Western societies far above all others in the understanding and mastery of the material world. Gauges of superiority and inferiority, such as differences in physical appearance and religious beliefs, that had dominated European thinking in the early centuries of overseas expansion remained important. But by the second half of the nineteenth century, European thinkers, whether they were racists or antiracists, expansionists or anti-imperialists, or on the political left or right,1 shared the conviction that through their scientific discoveries and inventions Westerners had gained an understanding of the workings of the physical world and an ability to tap its resources that were vastly superior to anything achieved by other peoples, past or present. |
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Many advocates of the civilizing mission ideology sought to capture the attributes that separated industrialized Western societies from those of the colonized peoples by contrasting Europeans (or Americans) with the dominated "others" with reference to a standard set of binary opposites that had racial, gender, and class dimensions. Europeans were, for example, seen to be scientific, energetic, disciplined, progressive, and punctual, while Africans and Asians were dismissed as superstitious, indolent, reactionary, out of control, and oblivious to time. These dichotomous comparisons were, of course, blatantly essentialist. But the late Victorians were prone to generalizing and stereotyping. They were also determined to classify and categorize all manner of things in the mundane world, and fond of constructing elaborate hypothetical hierarchies of humankind. |
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