Civilizing mission
[10] From the reductionist cultural perspective of Western Europe, colonialists saw non-Europeans as "backward nations", as people intrinsically incapable of socioeconomic progress.
[17] 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.
[20][21][22] The idea that the British were bringing civilization to the uncivilized areas of the world is famously expressed in Rudyard Kipling's poem The White Man's Burden.
[citation needed] 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.
[25] The "medical reformation" was done with "military rigor"[25] as part of a civilizing process in which American public health officers set out to train native Filipinos the "correct techniques of the body.
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.
"[29] 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".
[33] In addition, Portuguese merchants gained access to the African interior via the Senegal and Gambia rivers, which crossed long-standing trans-Saharan routes.
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.
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.
In the Island of Mozambique, one of the first places where the Portuguese permanently settled in Sub-Saharan Africa, they built the Chapel of Nossa Senhora de Baluarte, in 1522, now considered the oldest European building in the southern hemisphere.
Between the two groups, there was a third small group, the assimilados, comprising native blacks, mulatos, Asians, and mixed-race people, who had at least some formal education, were not subjected to paid forced labor, were entitled to some citizenship rights, and held a special identification card that differed from the one imposed on the immense mass of the African population (the indigenas), a card that the colonial authorities conceived of as a means of controlling the movements of forced labor (CEA 1998).
The indigenas were subject to the traditional authorities, who were gradually integrated into the colonial administration and charged with solving disputes, managing the access to land, and guaranteeing the flows of workforce and the payment of taxes.
After World War II, as communist and anti-colonial ideologies spread out across Africa, many clandestine political movements were established in support of independence.
Many felt they had received too little opportunity or resources to upgrade their skills and improve their economic and social situation to a degree comparable to that of the Europeans.
The U.S.-backed UPA wanted national self-determination, while for the Portuguese, who had settled in Africa and ruled considerable territory since the 15th century, their belief in a multi-racial, assimilated overseas empire justified going to war to prevent its breakup and protect its populations.
Due to the technological gap between both civilizations and the centuries-long colonial era, Portugal was a driving force in the development and shaping of all Portuguese Africa since the 15th century.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, in order to counter the increasing insurgency of the nationalistic guerrillas and show to the Portuguese people and the world that the overseas territories were totally under control, the Portuguese government accelerated its major development programs to expand and attempted to upgrade the infrastructure of the overseas territories in Africa by creating new roads, railways, bridges, dams, irrigation systems, schools and hospitals to stimulate an even higher level of economic growth and support from the populace.
[43] When the Kingdom of Portugal's explorers discovered Brazil in the 15th century and started to colonize its new possessions in the New World, the territory was inhabited by various indigenous peoples and tribes which had developed neither a writing system nor school education.
However, the Society's engagement in trade, architecture, science, literature, languages, arts, music, and religious debate corresponded, in fact, to the common and foremost purpose of Christianization.
Throughout the centuries of Portuguese rule, Brazilian students, mostly graduated in the Jesuit missions and seminaries, were allowed and even encouraged to enroll at higher education in mainland Portugal.
In the late 18th century, the Portuguese minister of the kingdom Marquis of Pombal attacked the power of the privileged nobility and the church and expelled the Jesuits from Portugal and its overseas possessions.
In 1772, even before the establishment of the Science Academy of Lisbon (1779), one of the first learned societies of both Brazil and the Portuguese Empire, the Sociedade Scientifica, was founded in Rio de Janeiro.
In the 19th century, the Portuguese royal family, headed by João VI, arrived in Rio de Janeiro escaping from the Napoleon's army invasion of Portugal in 1807.
Nineteenth century elites of South American republics also used a civilizing mission rhetoric to justify armed actions against indigenous groups.
[45][46] Six months later, on June 1, president Domingo Santa María declared:[47] The country has with satisfaction seen the problem of the reduction of the whole Araucanía solved.
