The White Man's Burden
The White Man's Burden is a Eurocentric view of the world used to justify imperialism. The term is the name of an 1899 poem by Rudyard Kipling, the sentiments of which give insight into this world view.
The first stanza of the Kipling poem reads:
- Take up the White Man's burden —
- Send forth the best ye breed —
- Go, bind your sons to exile
- To serve your captives' need;
- To wait, in heavy harness,
- On fluttered folk and wild —
- Your new-caught sullen peoples,
- Half devil and half child.
In this view, non-European cultures are seen as child-like as well as demonic, with people of European descent having an obligation to dominate them until they can take their place in the world.
The poem was originally published in a popular magazine (McClure's) in the US. It was written specifically because after the Spanish-American War, feeling in the US was more isolationist than not. It was believed that had the US not taken over Spain's position in the Philippines, another foreign power (quite possibly Japan) would have moved into the vacuum. Kipling wrote this poem specifically to help sway popular opinion in the US, so that a "friendly" western power would hold the strategically important Philippines.
The view and the term itself are widely regarded in the modern world as racist and condescending, cultivating a sense of European ascendancy of less civilized people. (See also cultural imperialism.) However, in a historical context, it makes clear the prevalent attitudes at the time that allowed colonialism to proceed.
There was a large extent to which colonial powers relied upon the excuse of "civilizing" the indigenous peoples—to the point where evidence of an indigenous origin for Great Zimbabwe was largely ignored for decades after its discovery, on the presumption that the existence of a sophisticated city in sub-Saharan Africa prior to European colonization would pose a threat to the argument that white rule was necessary to "civilize" the area. The general underestimation of ascendant Japan by the West in the late 19th and early 20th century stems from the same root; thus the result of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, which Japan won, was one of the first larger blows against this theory. There are those who feel that the British and the rest of the European intelligentsia have done the same with India's ancient Vedic past and the Aryan Invasion Theory.
A similar idea is the Hamitic Myth. The Hamitic Myth was a biblical rationalization for European exploitation in Africa, based on the supposed biblical lineage of certain African peoples.
References:
- "The White Man's Burden." McClure's Magazine 12 (Feb. 1899).
External links:
