[ Images of Imperialism ] [ Tea and Imperialism ] [ More Images ] Home 151

Rudyard Kipling. "The White Man’s Burden" was published in New York newspaper in 1899 and thus was addressed in particular to the people of the United States.

Was this a justification for imperialism? Was it parody of the notion that Europeans had a moral obligation to civilize the unfortunate peoples of the non-European world? Merriman alludes to it as an unfortunate expression of justification.

Which one of the four images would you choose as a visual expression of the essential meaning of the poem?

• "A Black White Elephant" A cartoon from the London magazine called Punch, portraying a Zulu warrior, a British army officer, and two top-hatted Europeans.
  
• "New Crowns for Old Ones" Another cartoon from Punch, this one being a caricature of the Prime Minister of England, Benjamin Disraeli offering the crown of India to Queen Victoria to make her Empress of India.
  
• An illustration from the Kipling Reader, published in 1908.
  
• A picture of a wood an African wood carving showing a pitch-helmeted European in a boat rowed by Africans.

Further reading: a novel by Chinua Achebe, entitled Things Fall Apart, published in 1959. Achebe is an Nigerian writer whose novel came out during a period of de-colonization following World War II, i.e., when countries under European domination were successfully gaining their independence.

The novel tells the story of the encounter between the Ibo people of what is now Nigeria and British missionaries and colonial administrators. It is written from the Ibo point of view, so the extract gives some idea of how British imperialism was experienced and viewed by indigenous Africans.

Conceptual Framework for State and Empire:

In the two dimensions of state formation (consolidation of power through internal control vs. the accumulation of power through the extent of additional territory and resources), imperialism represented a hyperbolic phase of accumulation as European states increased their control over the rest of the globe to it maximum level.

Figure adapted from Wayne Te Brake, Shaping History. Ordinary People in European Politics 1500-1700
       (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 9.

According to Merriman, in his Modern Europe (1996), on the eve of World War I in 1914, 84 percent of the globe was under European control.

Internal consolidation was proceeding within most European states as well through the building of armies based on conscription, compulsory schooling, and the use of imperialism as a means of deflecting internal discontent and strengthening loyalties to the nation.

PATTERNS OF ANNEXATION AND DOMINATION (see maps in Lim and Spielvogel).

In Africa beginning in the 1870s, the British worked northward from Capetown in the south and south from Egypt; the French from Morocco toward the east and the Suez basin. Germany was a latecomer. Belgium established the Belgian Congo in 1879, which proved the most brutal example of European exploitation, with native peoples used as forced labor.

Aggressive Nationalism and International Rivalries

• A German view of British Imperialism

Economic Pressures and Opportunities

• Exploitation of cheap labor and raw materials
• Markets for domestic production
• High yield investments (high risk, too)

Cultural Attitudes and Theories

• Racial theories

Example of Karl Pearson (1857-1936): a vigorous race should be "kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races." ["National Life from the Standpoint of Science," 1900]

• Moral Superiority and the Right of Conquest

A Belgian apologist: "On a vast continent, nearly empty, some dozens of savages lived, lost in the immensity of the forests and the savannas, tolerated by a physical environment which they did not dominate, leading—as it were, on the edge of nature—a precarious existence . . . . The riches of the soil and the subsoil were ignored, left to abandon, without a master. This great colonial movement of the nineteenth century, the partition of Black Africa, is based not on the right of conquest, but on the right of occupation." [Déjà vu: similar reasoning was used in   seventeenth-century colonial New England to justify the seizure of Amerindian lands.]

• Cultural Superiority and Obligations

Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man’s Burden"

• Humanitarianism

The era of Imperialism witnessed the greatest period of missionary activity by Christian Churches. By 1900, European missionaries nearly equaled the number of soldiers in Africa. At this time, there were 60,000 in Africa and Asia: 40,000 Roman Catholic missionaries and 20,000 Protestants.

Mount Holyoke graduates were numerous in Africa and Asia.

Western medicine was introduced into areas with missions.

Christianity could have a destabilizing effect on indigenous societies, as is shown in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

Industrialization provided Europeans with vastly superior transportation—steamships, railroads—superior communications—telegraph—and superior military power. The asymmetrical power relationship that so favored Europeans made imperialism possible and hard to resist.

Hilaire Beloc: "whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun and they have not."

The rise of mass electoral politics created new pressures for political leaders and diplomats to promote imperial policies as a way of deflecting social conflicts at home and the socialist threat behind them. The conversion of the British conservative leader Disraeli to imperialism in 1872 was an example of the concern to win votes through overseas glory. Two decades later, in a letter of 1895, Cecil Rhodes, who had few equals in his enthusiasm for imperialism and who grew fabulously wealthy from his exploitation of resources in Africa, argued that imperialism was necessary to stem civil war at home:

In order to save the forty million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from bloody civil war, our colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for setting the surplus population of this country, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.

Another expression of the social and moral benefits of imperialism for Europeans reflects a kind of social Darwinism in the sense that the strong will grow weak if not engaged in a struggle. Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India put it this way in 1907:

. . . without a world to conquer or a duty to perform [the British character] would rot to atrophy . . . . In Empire we have found not merely the key to glory and wealth but the call to duty and the means of service to mankind. Let us no more foreswear Empire than we would abjure our own souls.

 

[ Images of Imperialism ] [ Tea and Imperialism ] [ More Images ] Home 151