Colonial administrators reframed occupation as moral uplift of backward peoples

Evidence

Everything he has touched he has succeeded in.… Lord Cromer’s services during the past quarter of a century have raised Egypt from the lowest pitch of social and economic degradation until it now stands among Oriental nations, I believe, absolutely alone in its prosperity, financial and moral. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 116

Categorization

• CANDY: Balfour’s ‘financial and moral prosperity’ is a quotable colonial absurdity
• XREF: The moral-uplift framing grounds the civilizing-mission trope that later Islamophobia readings on the ‘burden of the white man’ inherit. — connects to: The ILO propagated a European-administered moral order that normalised colonial wage labour — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 241
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 116