Question

Why is "The White Man's Burden" poem by Kipling so important to history?

Answer 1

"The White Man's Burden" is a poem by the British Victorian poet and novelist Rudyard Kipling. While he originally wrote the poem to celebrate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, Kipling revised it in 1899 to exhort the American people to conquer and rule the Philippines. Conquest in the poem is not portrayed as a way for the white race to gain individual or national wealth or power. Instead, the speaker defines white imperialism and colonialism in moral terms, as a “burden” that the white race must take up in order to help the non-white races develop civilization. Because of the poem's influential moral argument for American imperialism, it played a key role in the congressional debates about whether America should annex the Philippine Islands after the Spanish-American War. The phrase "white man's burden" remains notorious as a racist justification for Western conquest.

Indeed, the poem in many ways appeals to the middle-class virtues of ordinary turn of the 20th century Americans by presenting imperialism as a sober, tedious duty rather than a grand adventure of conquest. Imperialism is a “toil of serf and sweeper,” not a “tawdry rule of kings.” The larger part of “the white man’s burden” is thus an exercise in “patience,” accepting the length and difficulty of the task set for the imperialists. Not a calling to a high heroic destiny, but a crude, almost homely task, imperialism suits the desires of those who imagine themselves honest workers on humanity’s behalf, rather than triumphant conquerors of weaker peoples. Put another way, the poem can be seen as cannily playing to the vanity of America precisely by refusing to play to its vanity. The poem is saying to an America that, in 1899, was feeling itself ready to emerge on the world stage: this is how you can stop being a child and grow up.