The civilizing mission () is a political rationale for military intervention and for colonization purporting to facilitate the cultural assimilation of indigenous peoples, especially in the period from the 15th to the 20th centuries.
The civilizing mission was primarily the cultural justification for the colonization in French colonies. In the Russian Empire, it was also associated with the Russian conquest of Central Asia The civilizing mission was also a common justification for the British and German colonialism. The Western colonial powers claimed that, as Christian nations, they were duty bound to disseminate Western civilization to what they perceived as heathen, primitive cultures. It was also applied by the Empire of Japan, which colonized Korea.
Origins In the eighteenth century, Europeans saw history as a linear, inevitable, and perpetual process of sociocultural evolution led by Western Europe.See Gilbert Rist,Le développement. Histoire d'une croyance occidentale. Chapter 2: «Les métamorphose d'un mythe occidental», Paris 1996, pp. 48–80; The History of Development, 3rd ed., 2008 From the reductionist cultural perspective of Western Europe, colonialists saw non-Europeans as "backward nations", as people intrinsically incapable of socioeconomic progress. In France, the philosopher Marquis de Condorcet formally postulated the existence of a European "holy duty" to help non-European peoples "which, to civilize themselves, wait only to receive the means from us, to find brothers among Europeans, and to become their friends and disciples". For example, the 1681 charter of Pennsylvania states that the colonists must reduce "the savage Natives by gentle and just manners to the Love of Civil Societie and Christian Religion." A recurring theme in colonial charters, the 1606 First Virginia Charter similarly mentions the "propagating of Christian religion to such people, as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God, and may in time bring the infidels and savages, living in those parts, to human civility, and to a settled and quiet government".
Modernization theoryprogressive transition from traditional, premodern society to modern, industrialized societyproposed that the economic self-development of a non-European people is incompatible with retaining their culture (mores, traditions, customs). That breaking from their old culture is prerequisite either to utter disappearance or to socioeconomic progress by way of practical revolutions in the sociocultural and religious institutions, which would change their collective psychology, mental attitude, philosophy and way of life. About the disappearance of indigenous people as the 'price' of modernization, see John H. Bodley, Victims of progress, 3rd ed., Mountain View, Calif:Mayfield Pub. Co., 1990 Therefore, development criticism sees economic development as a continuation of the civilizing mission. That to become civilized invariably means to become more "like us", therefore "civilizing a people" means that every society must become a capitalist consumer society, by renouncing their native culture to become Westernized.Rostow, Walter. The Stages of Economic Growth: A non-communist manifesto (1960); on Rostow, see Rist 1996, Chapter 6. Cultivation of land and people has been a similarly employed concept, used instead of civilizing in German speaking colonial contexts to press for colonization and cultural imperialism through "extensive cultivation" and "culture work".
According to Jennifer Pitts, there was considerable skepticism among French and British liberal thinkers (such as Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Edmund Burke, Denis Diderot and Marquis de Condorcet) about empire in the 1780s. However, by the mid-19th century, liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville endorsed empire on the basis of the civilizing mission.
By state Britain Although the British did not invent the term, the notion of a "civilizing mission" was equally important for them to justify colonialism. It was used to legitimatize British rule over the colonized, especially when the colonial enterprise was not very profitable.
The British used their sports as a tool to spread their values and culture among native populations, as well as a way of emphasizing their own dominance, as they were the owners of the rules of these sports and were naturally more experienced at playing these games. Test cricket, for example, was seen as a sport that inherently involved values of fair play and civilizedness. In some cases, British sports served a purpose of providing exercise and integration across social boundaries for native populations. The growth of British sports led to a natural decline of the colonized peoples' sports, creating fear amongst some that a loss of their native culture might hamper their ability to resist colonial rule. Over time, colonized peoples ended up seeing British sports as a venue to prove their equality to the British, and victories against the British in sports gave momentum to nascent independence movements.
The idea that the British were bringing civilization to the uncivilized areas of the world is famously expressed in Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem "The White Man's Burden".
France French historian Raoul Girardet describes the French ideology of "civilizing" Africans as "colonial humanism".Girardet, Raoul (1972) L’idée Coloniale En France De 1871 À 1962. Paris: La Table Ronde. French colonists viewed the civilizations of the peoples they were subjugating as "backward" and considered the act of colonization to be beneficial to them. According to Jules Brévié, former governor-general of French West Africa and French Indochina, the French also leveraged the idea of being ostensible colonial protectors of indigenous culture.Conflicted Missionaries: Power and Identity in French West Africa during the 1930s. The Historian,66 (1), p. 45.
United States
The concept of a "civilizing mission" would also be adopted by the United States during the age of New Imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Such projects would include US annexation of the Philippines during the aftermath of the Spanish-American War in 1898. The McKinley administration would declare that the US position within the Philippines was to “oversee the establishment of a civilian government” on the model of the United States. That would be done through adopting a civilizing process that would entail a "medical reformation" and other socioeconomic reforms. The Spanish health system had broken down after the 1898 war and was replaced with an American military model, which was made up of public health institutions. The "medical reformation" was done with "military rigor" as part of a civilizing process in which American public health officers set out to train native Filipinos the "correct techniques of the body." The process of "rationalized hygiene" was a technique for colonizing in the Philippines, as part of the American physicists assurance that the colonized Philippines was inhabited with propriety. Other "sweeping reforms and ambitious public works projects" would include the implementation of a free public school system, as well as architecture to develop "economic growth and civilizing influence" as an important component of McKinley's "benevolent assimilation."
Similar "civilizing" tactics were also incorporated into the American colonization of Puerto Rico in 1900. They would include extensive reform such as the legalization of divorce in 1902 in an attempt to instill American social mores into the island’s populace to "legitimatize the emerging colonial order."
Purported benefits for the colonized nation included "greater exploitation of natural resources, increased production of material goods, raised living standards, expanded market profitability and sociopolitical stability".
However, the occupation of Haiti in 1915 would also show a darker side to the American "civilizing mission." The historian Mary Renda has argued that the occupation of Haiti was solely for the "purposes of economic exploitation and strategic advantage," rather than to provide Haiti with "protection, education and economic support."
Portugal After consolidating its territory in the 13th century through a Reconquista of the Muslim states of Western Iberia, the Kingdom of Portugal started to expand overseas. In 1415, Islamic Ceuta was occupied by the Portuguese during the reign of John I of Portugal. Portuguese expansion in North Africa was the beginning of a larger process eventually known as the Portuguese Overseas Expansion, under which the Kingdom's goals included the expansion of Christianity into Muslim lands and the desire of nobility for epic acts of war and conquest with the support of the Pope.
As the Portuguese extended their influence around the coast to Mauritania, Senegambia (by 1445) and Guinea, they created trading posts. Rather than become direct competitors to the Muslim merchants, they used expanding market opportunities in Europe and the Mediterranean to increase trade across the Sahara. In addition, Portuguese merchants gained access to the African interior via the Senegal and Gambia rivers, which crossed long-standing trans-Saharan routes. The Portuguese brought in copper ware, cloth, tools, wine and horses. Trade goods soon also included arms and ammunition. In exchange, the Portuguese received gold (transported from mines of the Akan deposits), pepper (a trade which lasted until Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498) and ivory. It was not until they reached the Kongo coast in the 1480s that they moved beyond Muslim trading territory in Africa.
Forts and trading posts were established along the coast. Portuguese sailors, merchants, cartographers, priests and soldiers had the task of taking over the coastal areas, settling, and building churches, forts and factories, as well as exploring areas unknown to Europeans. A Company of Guinea was founded as a Portuguese governmental institution to control the trade, and called Casa da Guiné or Casa da Guiné e Mina from 1482 to 1483, and Casa da Índia e da Guiné in 1499.
The first of the major European trading forts, Elmina, was founded on the Gold Coast in 1482 by the Portuguese. Elmina Castle (originally known as the "São Jorge da Mina Castle") was modeled on the Castelo de São Jorge, one of the earliest royal residences in Lisbon. Elmina, which means "the port", became a major trading center. By the beginning of the colonial era, there were forty such forts operating along the coast. Rather than being icons of colonial domination, the forts acted as trading poststhey rarely saw military actionthe fortifications were important, however, when arms and ammunition were being stored prior to trade.H. Kuper, Urbanization and Migration in West Africa, 1965, Berkeley, Calif., U. of California The 15th-century Portuguese exploration of the African coast, is commonly regarded as the harbinger of European colonialism, and also marked the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade, Christian missionary evangelization and the first globalization processes which were to become a major element of the European colonialism until the end of the 18th century.
Although the Portuguese Empire's policy regarding native peoples in the less technologically advanced places around the world (most prominently in Brazil) had always been devoted to enculturation, including teaching and evangelization of the indigenous populations, as well as the creation of novel infrastructure to openly support these roles, it reached its largest extent after the 18th century in what was then Portuguese Africa and Portuguese Timor. New cities and towns, with their Europe-inspired infrastructure, which included administrative, military, healthcare, educational, religious, and entrepreneurial halls, were purportedly designed to accommodate Portuguese settlers.