Victor Gillam in the context of "William McKinley"

The civilizing mission (Spanish: misión civilizadora; Portuguese: Missão civilizadora; French: Mission civilisatrice) is a political rationale for military intervention and for colonization purporting to facilitate the cultural assimilation of indigenous peoples, especially in the period from the 15th to the 20th centuries. As a principle of Western culture, the term was most prominently used in justifying French colonialism in the late-15th to mid-20th centuries. The civilizing mission was the cultural justification for the colonization of French Algeria, French West Africa, French Indochina, Portuguese Angola and Portuguese Guinea, Portuguese Mozambique and Portuguese Timor, among other colonies. The civilizing mission also was a popular justification for the British and German colonialism. In the Russian Empire, it was also associated with the Russian conquest of Central Asia and the Russification of that region. The Western colonial powers claimed that, as Christian nations, they were duty bound to disseminate Western civilization to what they perceived as heathen, primitive cultures. It was also applied by the Empire of Japan, which colonized Korea.

"The White Man's Burden" (1899), by Rudyard Kipling, is a poem about the Philippine–American War (1899–1902) that exhorts the United States to assume colonial control of the Filipino people and their country.

In "The White Man's Burden", Kipling encouraged the American annexation and colonisation of the Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago purchased in the three-month Spanish–American War (1898). As an imperialist poet, Kipling exhorts the American reader and listener to take up the enterprise of empire yet warns about the personal costs faced, endured, and paid in building an empire; nonetheless, American imperialists understood the phrase "the white man's burden" to justify imperial conquest as a civilising mission that is ideologically related to the continental expansion philosophy of manifest destiny of the early 19th century. With a central motif of the poem being the superiority of white men, it has long been criticised as a racist poem.