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"The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands" (1899), by Rudyard Kipling, is a poem about the Philippine–American War (1899–1902), which invites the U.S. to assume colonial control of that country; the poem was published in The New York Sun, on 10 February 1899.
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Originally, Kipling wrote the poem for the Diamond Jubilee celebration of Queen Victoria's reign (1837–1901), but it was exchanged for the poem "Recessional", also by Kipling. Later, he rewrote the poem "The White Man's Burden" to address the American colonization of the Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago conquered from Imperial Spain, in the three-month Spanish–American War (1898); the birth of the American Empire.
The poem exhorts the reader and the listener to embark upon the enterprise of empire, yet gives somber warning about the costs involved; nonetheless, American imperialists understood the phrase The white man's burden to justify imperialism as a noble enterprise of civilization, conceptually related to the American philosophy of Manifest Destiny.
The title and themes of "The White Man's Burden" ostensibly make the poem about Eurocentric racism and about the belief of the Western world that industrialisation is the way to civilise the Third World.
History
The poem of "The White Man's Burden" was first published in the 10 February 1899 edition of the New York Sun, a McLure's newspaper.
Three days earlier, on 7 February 1899, to the senate floor, Senator Benjamin Tillman had read aloud three stanzas of "The White Man's Burden" in argument against ratification of the Treaty of Paris , and that the U.S should renounce claim of authority over the Philippine Islands. To that effect, Senator Tillman asked:
Four days later, on 11 February 1899, the U.S. Congress ratified the "Treaty of Peace between the United States of America and the Kingdom of Spain" (Treaty of Paris, 1898), which established American imperial jurisdiction upon the archipelago of the Philippine Islands, in the Pacific Ocean, near the Asian mainland.
Poem
The White Man's Burden (1899)
The imperialist interpretation of "The White Man's Burden" (1899) proposes that the white man has a moral obligation to rule the non-white peoples of the Earth, whilst encouraging their economic, cultural, and social progress through colonialism.
In the later 20th century, in the context of decolonisation and the Developing World, the phrase "the white man's burden" was emblematic of the "well-intentioned" aspects of Western colonialism and "Eurocentrism". The poem's imperialist interpretation also includes the milder, philanthropic colonialism of the missionaries:
The poem positively represents colonialism as the moral burden of the white race, which is divinely destined to civilise the brutish and barbarous parts of the world; to wit, the Filipino people are "new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child". Although imperialist beliefs were common currency in the culture of that time, there were opponents to Kipling's poetic misrepresentation of imperial conquest and colonisation, notably Mark Twain (To the Person Sitting in Darkness, 1901) and William James, for them "The White Man's Burden" was plain of manner, meaning, and intent.
Kipling offered the poem to Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York state (1899–1900), to help him politically persuade anti-imperialist Americans to accept the annexation of the Philippine Islands to the United States. Kipling's literary work extolling the virtues of British colonialism in India was popular in the U.S.; thus, in September 1898, Kipling could tell Governor Roosevelt:
In the event, the Norton Anthology of English Literature thematically aligns the poem "The White Man's Burden" (1899) with Kipling's beliefs that the British Empire (1583–1945) was the Englishman's "Divine Burden to reign God's Empire on Earth." Like much of his work, The White Man's Burden (1899) is a poetic celebration of imperialism, which Rudyard Kipling believed eventually would benefit the colonised peoples.
Literary responses
In the late 19th century, the philanthropic racism that Rudyard Kipling presented and defended in the poem of The White Man's Burden (1899) provoked contemporary parodies and critical works, such as "The Brown Man's Burden" (1899) by Henry Labouchère, a British politician and "The Black Man's Burden: A Response to Kipling" (April 1899) by H. T. Johnson, a clergyman, and Take up the Black Man's Burden by J. Dallas Bowser. Moreover, a Black Man's Burden Association was organised to demonstrate to the public how the colonial mistreatment of brown people in the Philippines Islands was an extension of the Jim Crow laws (1863–1965) of the legal mistreatment of black Americans at home, in the U.S.
Ernest Crosby wrote a poem, "The Real White Man's Burden" (1902).
In the Congo Free State (1885–1908), the British journalist, E. D. Morel, reported the brutality of Belgian imperialism in "The Black Man's Burden" (1903). In The Black Man's Burden: The White Man in Africa, from the Fifteenth Century to World War I (1920), Morel presents a critique of the relation between the White Man's Burden and the Black Man's Burden.
In poem "The Black Man's Burden [A Reply to Rudyard Kipling]" (1920), Hubert Harrison counters the points of colonial-civilization that Kipling extols in "The White Man's Burden" (1899), which result in the moral degradation of colonist and colonized.