Colonialism wore two humanitarian faces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, aggressive and reformist. Aggressive humanitarianism – a modified, “benevolent,” colonialism – was the famous “white man's burden” which European powers took up in Africa, and the US shouldered in the Philippines. With the gradual turn to aggressive humanitarianism, Western colonialism in Africa thus began an uneven transformation from brute force to what Foucault called disciplinary power or the panopticon. In the former, power is exercised through terror and destruction; in the latter, while naked force is still used, power is increasingly exercised through discipline, socialization (eliciting compliance by instilling in the other a coincidence of interests and beliefs), and surveillance.

Aggressive humanitarianism became dominant as colonial powers used anti-slavery arguments to justify greater intervention and colonial settlement in Africa.