-"How did imperialistic thinking like that of the Earl of Cromer relate to the ideas discussed in the lectures on the Victorian Era and Culture Wars? In other words, how was imperialistic ideology connected to how Europeans saw their place in the world as of the late nineteenth century?
Imperialism was an ideology, but an ideology that was based on a culture rather than a set of revolutionary ideas or concepts. What motivated imperialism were imperialistic thinking inspired by cultures like Victorian culture, what led imperialism was insistence on the same values, and what ended imperialism were the inevitable consequences of these values. Therefore, the special way that Europeans saw their place in the world is deeply connected to the imperialistic thinking. Cultural war and Victorian culture with all their minor or major aspects including pseudo-science, mass culture, and the Kulturkampf created a basis and a standard for imperialistic thinking.
Victorian culture contributed the most to the creation of imperialistic thinking. A culture that sees success as a result of inherent moral characteristics, of course, would consider success in “empire-building” as a proof for superiority. In fact, the idea of “jockeying for position on the world stage”,
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Existence of “mass production” needed massive number of consumers and massive number of raw materials, which were both available in lands that went under empires. According to the lecture, one of the few economic benefits that European gained by invading other lands were “the expropriation of raw materials, which generally shipped back to Europe to be turned into finished products”. Moreover, the imperialistic thinking owed much of its support to the “articles praising the civilizing mission involved in, for example, occupying a couple of thousand square miles in Africa that the reader had never heard