Hobson argued imperialists used humanitarian rhetoric as a moral fig leaf

Evidence

If imperialism was the result of the ‘selfish interests of certain industrial, financial and professional classes’, he asked, then why did it garner such broad support? His answer was that imperialists attached themselves to those movements that portrayed themselves as doing good in the world, and represented their own motives in humanitarian terms. … Hobson did not question the sincerity of what he framed as these ‘disinterested’ aims, but did argue that imperialists latch onto these elevated sentiments in order to create a ‘moral justification’ for their actions. The combination of strong interested forces with weak disinterested ones, he wrote, ‘is the homage which imperialism pays to humanity’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 253

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The two-phase argument — asks why material interests win mass support, answers via the cooptation of sincere humanitarian sentiment — is a durable analytic structure directly relevant to how the reader thinks about human-rights discourse being weaponized.
• XREF: Directly anticipates the book’s core thesis that human rights discourse was adopted by market-friendly forces — the mirror image of Hobson’s imperialist humanitarianism. — connects to: Humanitarian discourse recast colonized people as passive objects of sympathy rather than political agents — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 390; Public humanitarian language masked private economic motives in imperial expansion — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 751; Liberal rhetoric can mask imperial racism as benevolence (+1 more)
• SEED: The phrase ‘the homage which imperialism pays to humanity’ is a ready-made seed for an article on how market institutions borrow moral legitimacy from rights discourse.
• ADDENDUM: Parallel to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ in how high-sounding moral language is used for class/identity signaling and political justification.

Broader Connections

• Public humanitarian language masked private economic motives in imperial expansion #corroborates (0.95) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 751
• Humanitarian discourse recast colonized people as passive objects of sympathy rather than political agents #expands (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 390
• Liberal rhetoric can mask imperial racism as benevolence #corroborates (0.82)
• Human rights rhetoric masks imperial assumptions that racialize colonized peoples #expands (0.80)