In 1798, as Napoleon set off for Egypt, he shouted to his troops: ‘Soldiers, you are undertaking a conquest with incalculable consequences for civilisation’. Unlike the situation when the concept was formed, from now on nations came to consider the process of civilisation as completed within their own societies; they came to see themselves as bearers of an existing or finished civilisation to others, as standard-bearers of expanding civilisation. Of the whole preceding process of civilisation nothing remained in their consciousness except a vague residue. Its outcome was taken simply as an expression of their higher gifts; the fact that, and the question of how, in the course of many centuries, civilised behaviour had been attained was of no interest. And the consciousness of their own superiority, the consciousness of this ‘civilisation’, from now on served at least those nations which become colonial conquerors, and therefore a kind of upper class to large sections of the non-European world, as a justification of their rule, to the same degree that earlier the ancestors of the concept of civilisation, politesse and civilité, had served the courtly-aristocratic upper class as a justification of theirs.