British Imperialism

In class we briefly touched on the idea of what Rudyard Kipling was exactly trying to portray with his works that we read. Both the "The White Man's Burden" and "The Man Who Would Be King" have a seriously imperialistic message on the surface level, and it is highly debated if this was Kipling’s way of criticizing this aspect of British culture or it was really how he felt. I personally do not have a straight answer. But in many ways, it is not important what Kipling actually meant, what matters is most is people reading his works since they were first published have interpreted them as a part of this imperialistic rhetoric that plagued Britain in the 19th century. To provide some historical context to the world that Kipling was writing in, the British Empire was massive at the time, claiming ownership over India, Canada, Australia, various areas of Africa and more. Because as the famous saying goes “The sun never sets on the British Empire”. This is illustrated in a political cartoon from the time below, with the caption describing England as the "devilfish".

One of the motivating factors behind imperialism was this “white savior complex” which is evident in the language Kipling uses in the "The White Man's Burden" with lines such as, "Take up the White Man's burden, Have done with childish days—" (25), and by calling the people native to the areas that England colonized “Half-devil and half-child” (4). Specifically associating these people with the devil and children speaks volumes of the attitudes of the British. The half devil part clearly means that they view them as evil, and the half child part means that they see them, as people who need to be taken care of, which is were the British Empire comes in, they saw the act of colonizing as saving these people from themselves. This language Kipling uses is what the people of the British empire were using at the time to justify going in and taking over societies that had been functioning just fine for thousands of years. But the colonizers from England did not care about any of this- they just saw cultures different from their own that needed to be “fixed”, so they imposed their western standards onto these people, and created systems of oppression that many countries are struggling to recover from to this day. So regardless of the true meaning behind Kipling's words, in the end it does not matter, because society saw them as backing up the imperialistic views of England at the time, so that is what they have come to be synonymous with.