Elias's stance on the connection between the European civilizing process and imperial expansion was encapsulated in the previously cited claim that the idea of civilization gave ‘expression to the continuously expansionist tendency of colonising groups’ (Elias 2012 [1939]: 17); it provided the rationale for ‘civilizing initiatives’ to deliver ‘progress’ to backward societies. Those formulations may create the impression that Europeans elaborated their images of civilization before the waves of colonial expansion – that they first developed the discourses of civilization and only later gained control over non-European peoples, drawing freely on old narratives to justify imperial domination. References to crusader expansion in the study of the European civilizing process provide a somewhat more nuanced portrait of the interrelations between intra-and extra-European developments (Elias [1939] 2012: 246ff). But the absence of much discussion of colonization and the process of civilization left Elias's 1939 inquiry vulnerable to the criticism that it was wedded to ‘a purely European genealogy of learning’, since no account was taken of the ways in which relations with non-European peoples had influenced developments within Europe (see p. 60). The objection could have been averted by closer examination of the historical reality that Europeans did not define themselves as civilized in isolation from other groups and then, as they encountered other peoples for the first time, begin to wrestle with how to comprehend strange customs and how to conduct relations with societies that were, at first glance, savage by comparison. The critique could have been pre-empted by exploring how global interconnections shaped European conceptions of civilizational superiority.

As conveyed by the idea of the ‘empire of civilization’, the European civilizing process developed hand-in-hand with the phases of colonial expansion and related ‘standards of civilization’ (Bowden 2009). Civilized self-understandings that celebrated European achievements in becoming more peaceful and restrained, more refined and highly mannered emerged in tandem with narratives that stressed the licentiousness, impulsiveness and cruelty of peoples who seemed ‘animalic’ or childlike because of seemingly low levels of emotion management and because free rein was apparently given to basic impulses.