Contested Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission Ideology

In: Journal of world history: official journal of the World History Association, Band 15, Heft 1, S. 31-63

Abstract

Perhaps the most fundamental and enduring effects of the worldwide crisis of the European
colonial order brought on by the Great War of 1914-1918 resulted from the challenges
it provoked on the part of Asian and African novelists, poets, philosophers, and
emerging political leaders. Four years of indecisive, mechanized slaughter on the Western
Front gave rise to spirited and widely publicized critiques of the civilizing mission
ideology that had long been invoked to justify European dominance. Since at least the
early nineteenth century, the credibility of the civilizing mission credo for European
colonizers as well as subject peoples depended increasingly on its emphasis on the
unprecedented superiority that Europeans had attained in science and technology over
all other peoples and cultures. Some Indian and African, and indeed also European,
intellectuals had challenged these gauges of European racial and historical preeminence
in the decades before 1914. But the appalling uses to which European discoveries
and inventions were put in the First World War raised profound doubts among
intellectuals across four continents about the progressive nature of industrial civilization
and its potential as the model for all of humanity to emulate. The highly contentious
exchanges that these questions gave rise to in the postwar decades soon coalesced
into arguably the first genuinely worldwide discourse and proved a critical prelude to
the struggles for decolonization that followed.