The White Man's Burden

"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 conquered 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]

^ ^a ^b ^c Hitchens, Christopher. Blood, Class, and Empire: The Enduring Anglo–American Relationship (2004) pp. 63–64
^ Zwick, Jim (16 December 2005). Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898–1935. Archived from the original on 16 September 2002.
^ 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'".
^
Examples of justification for imperialism based on Kipling's poem include the following (originally published 1899–1902):
- Opinion archive, International Herald Tribune (4 February 1999). "In Our Pages: 100, 75 and 50 Years Ago; 1899: Kipling's Plea". International Herald Tribune: 6.: "An extraordinary sensation has been created by Mr. Rudyard Kipling's new poem, The White Man's Burden, just published in a New York magazine. It is regarded as the strongest argument yet published in favor of expansion."
- Dixon, Thomas (1902). The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden—1865–1900. Facsimile of a novel by Thomas Dixon, Jr. praising the Ku Klux Klan, via Google Books. Also available at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (full text).
^ Pimentel, Benjamin (26 October 2003). The Philippines' 'Liberator' Was Really a Colonizer: Bush's Revisionist History. p. D3. Archived from the original on 29 June 2011. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help): characterising the poem as a "call to imperial conquest".

[auto2-1] 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):
Opinion archive, International Herald Tribune (4 February 1999). "In Our Pages: 100, 75 and 50 Years Ago; 1899: Kipling's Plea". International Herald Tribune: 6.: "An extraordinary sensation has been created by Mr. Rudyard Kipling's new poem, The White Man's Burden, just published in a New York magazine. It is regarded as the strongest argument yet published in favor of expansion."

Dixon, Thomas (1902). The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden—1865–1900. Facsimile of a novel by Thomas Dixon, Jr. praising the Ku Klux Klan, via Google Books. Also available at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (full text).

[5] Opinion archive, International Herald Tribune (4 February 1999). "In Our Pages: 100, 75 and 50 Years Ago; 1899: Kipling's Plea". International Herald Tribune: 6.: "An extraordinary sensation has been created by Mr. Rudyard Kipling's new poem, The White Man's Burden, just published in a New York magazine. It is regarded as the strongest argument yet published in favor of expansion."

[6] Dixon, Thomas (1902). The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden—1865–1900. Facsimile of a novel by Thomas Dixon, Jr. praising the Ku Klux Klan, via Google Books. Also available at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (full text).

[5] Pimentel, Benjamin (26 October 2003). The Philippines' 'Liberator' Was Really a Colonizer: Bush's Revisionist History. p. D3. Archived from the original on 29 June 2011. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help): characterising the poem as a "call to imperial conquest".

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