Imperial states touted humanitarian reform as empire’s raison d’être.

Evidence

One view describes an age of empire in which imperial states and their bourgeois subjects celebrated the story that humanitarian social reform was empire’s raison d’être and driving force. At home and abroad, agendas motivated by “compassion,” “pity,” and “empathy”—imposed and unsolicited—motivated reformist zealots who swarmed the underworlds of Amsterdam, London, Paris, and their colonial “Other Worlds” overseas. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 370