phantasmagoria of animegirl view

it picks up a little later than this, but my favorite piece of writing on the development of white supremacy as an ideology & the material conditions that led to it is the essay "slavery, race, and ideology in the United States of America", by the historian Barbara J Fields. she uses a lot of documents from early colonies to build out an argument that ideology in general & white supremacy in particular don't develop to guide people's decisions, but rather to justify them

There's a good essay in the Guardian by Kwame Anthony Appiah about the idea of "Western civilization", and the idea of a unified "Europeans" seems to have come from the Battle of Tours in 732, where Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, held off the Umayyad invasion of France and defeated the armies of al-Andalus, and ever since, Europe has defined itself by the concept of Christendom, and by its opposition to Islam and other "infidels", and this definition by opposition only got further cemented in the 1500s when the Ottoman Empire's growth into Europe was halted at Vienna.

I have not read this myself (most of my knowledge about this comes from literary analysis which isn't what you want) BUT I think some of the cultural context you're after might be in Roman Britain: Outpost of the Empire by H.H. Scullard. Lots of primary source accounts of life in the centuries after Julius Caesar invaded Britain, with particular regards to the imperial cult and the melting of local European religions together with Christianity. This period is basically how white Brits declared themselves the inheritors of the legacy of Rome and why British poets make constant references to shit like The Aeneid

at a guess I think a lot of this comes down to the evangelical nature of Christianity, specifically the idea that people who aren't "saved" (part of the church) are doomed to eternal suffering, and thus provides a moral framework for expanding power that can work in concert with political ambition to create a cycle of self-justifying growth

• Erskine, Roman Imperialism (Edinburgh, 2010)
• Geoffrey of Monmouth The History of the Kings of Britain / Historia regum Britanniae (a decent English translation's available in Penguin Classics)

The first of these lays out some of the explanations historians have given for the Roman imperial model. The second of these, which is almost entirely made up, is a headline example of the kind of mythological transference that underpinned English connections to Troy; it is perhaps useful context to remember that the Britanniae in Geoffrey's title became the Welsh, and that (some centuries later) the Tudors conceived of themselves as a family emerging from Wales. (Which was conquered well before Henry VIII's day; Scotland on the other hand was never conquered, but joined first as a separate royal possession when James VI and I took the English throne, and then in a political union in 1707.)

On the particular contours of later power either side of and during the nineteenth century, you might find readability and some sympathy in Hobsbawm's trilogy, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, and The Age of Empire. There are at least worse places to start. For England in particular, you won't agree with everything in Hilton's A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846 but it'll give you lots of facts with which to argue one way or another.

The early Portuguese conquests in Asia present a useful limit case for the topic, because while it's not difficult to explain why European powers sought and made conquests in the Americas, in Asia the Portuguese faced states with rough parity in military technology and strong numerical advantages. As a starting point, you could try Conquerors by Roger Crowley; it's a popular history book with unsympathetic moments, and I wouldn't stop there, but it treats the topic in one volume and will point to further reading.

I'm afraid I don't know off the top of my head of a good single-volume history specifically of English state-formation around Henry VIII. You might get something out of the recent Tudor Empire: The Making of Early Modern Britain and the British Atlantic World, 1485-1603 (2021) by Jessica S. Hower; I've not yet read it.

How to access these books is a separate question, beyond my competence.

Since you asked for books, and not views, I'm holding my tongue on the actual questions, and indeed their underlying assumptions.

It's not exactly in line with your request but if you haven't read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond then I recommend it.

Watts, V. (2013). Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2(1), 20–34.

This article will examine how agency is circulated through human and non-human worlds in the creation and maintenance of society from an Indigenous point of view. Through processes of colonization, the corruption of essential categories of Indigenous conceptions of the world (the feminine and land) has led to a disconnect between how this agency is manifested in Indigenous societies. Through a comparison between the epistemological-ontological divide and an Indigenous conception of Place-Thought, this article will argue that agency has erroneously become exclusive to humans, thereby removing non-human agency from what constitutes a society. This is accomplished in part by mythologizing Indigenous origin stories and separating out communication, treaty-making, and historical agreements that human beings held with the animal world, the sky world, the spirit world, etc. In order for colonialism to operationalize itself, it must attempt to make Indigenous peoples stand in disbelief of themselves and their histories. This article attempts to reaffirm this sacred connection between place, non-human and human in an effort to access the “pre-colonial mind”.

Simpson, L. B. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), 1–25.

A resurgence of Indigenous political cultures, governances and nation-building requires generations of Indigenous peoples to grow up intimately and strongly connected to our homelands, immersed in our languages and spiritualities, and embodying our traditions of agency, leadership, decision-making and diplomacy. This requires a radical break from state education systems – systems that are primarily designed to produce communities of individuals willing to uphold settler colonialism. This paper uses Nishnaabeg stories to advocate for a reclamation of land as pedagogy, both as process and context for Nishnaabeg intelligence, in order to nurture a generation of Indigenous peoples that have the skills, knowledge and values to rebuild our nation according to the word views and values of Nishnaabeg culture.

A book I found quite insightful on this, even though it's a pop history and wasn't really intending to be, was David Mitchell's Unruly. Basically, the legitimacy of England's monarchs have been quite shaky through out most of its history, which means they constantly have to justify their claims. Which leads to both propagandizing about why they should be in charge and demonstrating the brute fact of their in-chargeness by constantly taking charge of more things. This creates a vicious cycle that results in stuff like pressing tenuous claims to the French throne, which requires more propaganda, conquest etc.

Eventually you get to Henry VIII, whose dad was basically just some guy who opportunistically grabbed the throne, telling the pope, who he had been more than fine with up to that point, to go take a hike after the pope tells him, "No". Because who's in charge, Henry or the pope? And he does this by asserting that Britain is an empire because a pope outranks a king, sure, but not an emperor.

One that I think is partially relevant is Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber. It doesn't talk about how European ideology came to grow like that (or at best in passing) but it does talk a decent amount about how several events & systems in Europe's colonialism involved people being forced by the mechanisms of debt. It also highlights Christianity's increasing permissiveness towards usury. If Graeber's thesis holds up I think those are some important pieces to the puzzle you're asking about.
(Especially if it means that the supremacist and financial parts of the ideology have been feeding off each other since well before capitalism properly emerged, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to make conclusions about that.)

It's maybe a bit of a hard sell for this particular topic given that's spread over the latter half of a 400 page book, but the book's scope isn't limited to Europe or the timeframe of colonialism.