 The idea of uniting humanity under one empire or monarch, however, became an ambivalent appeal by the seventeenth century with the entrenchment in Europe of the system of sovereign states after the Peace of Westphalia (1648). At the same time, European encounters with non-European worlds precipitated European ambitions based on the principle of promoting civilization as an organizing framework for legitimizing European imperial and colonial expansion into other parts of the world (Keene 2002).