It's still evangelically potent, however. In fact it's pretty much the official state religion of the West, in the moral sense of ordering everyone's goals, values, and activities.

In comparison, the 'official' religions are just entertainment.

This represents the true "dark side" of a major aspect of The Enlightenment Project - secularization  and universalization of what had been religious elements of the culture. Peter Dale Scott observed:

"that both outer and inner enlightenment (the current word is development) are damned, even murderous, if they do not honor each other." I think my writings most relevant to tikkun olam have been those, in both poetry and prose, seeking to reduce the tensions between these two strands of enlightenment.

Increasingly I see both communism and capitalism as twin offspring of the increasingly secular outer enlightenment of the eighteenth century. This has produced both radical progress and radical problems, along with Comte, Marx, Freud, and today's academic social sciences. This trend has lost sight of the truths of the eighteenth century right-lobe spiritual enlightenment, which eventually produced Blake, Hoelderlin, Kierkegaard, Rilke, and Eliot.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

That warfare and imperialism in the Mediterranean world may have been different, on average, than in other major centers of civilization seems possible.  I don't think you can say it dates back to the Romans, though, as the Assyrians seem to have set a strong precedent.

Then again, as has been mentioned elsewhere, the Qin Emperor was pretty damn nasty.

That Europe imperialized to a greater degree than other regional world Empires was entirely due to their luck of discovering the Americas first, and their ability to take advantage of the disease gradient.  Without that, the colonization of the Americas would have been a lot more like the colonization of Africa - which went absolutely nowhere until the the mid 1800's.  Without American gold and silver, Europe would have never been able to break the pre-existing trade networks of the Indian Ocean, and world history would have been so utterly and completely different that it's not worth discussing.

That Europe has culturally evangalized to a greater degree is debatable, given the immense spread of Islam.  It's too early to tell if the current fad for European culture and values is a passing fad, or a longer-term thing, but it's pretty clear that Islam is here to stay in Central, South, and SE Asia, and North Africa.  

As Graeber suggests, there may have been a distinctly European mode of imperialism which dates back to Rome - possibly earlier - and which has a consistently violent, self-justificatory, and abusive character.

I didn't see Graeber (in Debt, I presume) suggesting a peculiarly European mode of imperialism. He sees parallels between Europe and India's medieval structures after the end of the first age of empires ca. 300BC - 600AD. Of the three major civilizations born in the Axial Age (China, India, Mesopotamia), China seems to have had a different development, not having lost its empire in the "dark ages" of the late first millennium.

Maybe there was a lasting difference between West and East due to the difference between Alexander and Ashoka, but I don't remember that being one of Graeber's themes. I got more an impression that he argues that debts are one of the prime drivers of atrocity as heavily indebted people engage in high-stakes bets to try to get out from under heavy debts. He dwells on the Spanish conquistadors in the Americas, but he doesn't imply their behaviour is characteristically Western.

In the long run, we're all misquoted — not Keynes