“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death.”
E W Said
Codswallop.
Many empires freely admitted that they found it more convenient to make force the last resort because it was cost-effective to try other things first, without ever claiming that they were unique in this. That is why the European maritime empires freely acknowledged Roman precedents and so on (Philip of Macedon came up with “fraud before force, but force after all”)..
Furthermore, the British, Dutch and Portuguese empires as such, unlike the French, never claimed that they had “a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy” as a complete list, never, not once. What they did often claim was that they did confer improvements of that sort (which they sometimes did, given the low base in many places), and they secondarily intended some of that list at the time (though never democracy, except sometimes a very limited version like “Home Rule” as a cheaper substitute for ruling by force), but they never made out that that was why they were in the empire business. Of course, many British, Dutch and Portuguese imperialists tried out that sort of line as propaganda later, but they came along after the empires had been got going by others who were less hypocritical.
History doesn’t repeat itself.
History is the repetition of human nature.
Understand human nature and you understand history past, present, and future.