The White Man's Burden

For the book by William Easterly, see William Easterly. "White Man's Burden" redirects here. For the 1995 film, see White Man's Burden (film).

The editorial cartoon "'The White Man's Burden' (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling)" shows John Bull (Britain) and Uncle Sam (U.S.) delivering the world's people of colour to civilization (Victor Gillam, Judge magazine, 1 April 1899). The people in the basket carried by Uncle Sam are labelled Cuba, Hawaii, Samoa, 'Porto Rico', and the Philippines, while the people in the basket carried by John Bull are labelled Zulu, China, India, 'Soudan', and Egypt.

"The White Man's Burden" (1899), by Rudyard Kipling, is a poem about the Philippine–American War (1899–1902) that exhorts the United States to assume colonial control of the Filipino people and their country.[1] Originally written to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria (22 June 1897), the jingoistic poem was replaced with the sombre "Recessional" (1897), also a Kipling poem about empire.

In "The White Man's Burden", Kipling encouraged the American annexation and colonisation of the Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago purchased in the three-month Spanish–American War (1898).[1] As an imperialist poet, Kipling exhorts the American reader and listener to take up the enterprise of empire yet warns about the personal costs faced, endured, and paid in building an empire;[1] nonetheless, American imperialists understood the phrase "the white man's burden" to justify imperial conquest as a civilising mission that is ideologically related to the continental expansion philosophy of manifest destiny of the early 19th century.[2][3][4][5] With a central motif of the poem being the superiority of white men, it has long been criticised as a racist poem.[6]

  1. ^ a b c Hitchens, Christopher. Blood, Class, and Empire: The Enduring Anglo–American Relationship (2004) pp. 63–64
  2. ^ Zwick, Jim (16 December 2005). Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898–1935. Archived from the original on 16 September 2002.
  3. ^ Miller, Stuart Creighton (1982). Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-03081-9. p. 5: ". . . imperialist editors came out in favor of retaining the entire archipelago (using) higher-sounding justifications related to the 'white man's burden'".
  4. ^ Examples of justification for imperialism based on Kipling's poem include the following (originally published 1899–1902):
  5. ^ Pimentel, Benjamin (26 October 2003). "The Philippines' 'Liberator' Was Really a Colonizer: Bush's Revisionist History". San Francisco Chronicle. p. D3. Archived from the original on 29 June 2011.: characterising the poem as a "call to imperial conquest".
  6. ^ Brantlinger, Patrick (2007). "Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" and Its Afterlives". English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. 50 (2): 172–191. doi:10.1353/elt.2007.0017. ISSN 1559-2715.