Poem Essay: An Analysis Of The White Man's Burden

The late 1800’s were a tumultuous time for the United States, one consisting of both monumental gains, serious losses, and unsurprisingly, a number of vicious wars. Two of these wars in particular, are important, not to the history of the United States specifically, but to almost all world powers at the time, as they were prime examples of what would later be referred to as “The White Man’s Burden”. The first being the Spanish-American War, which mainly revolved around U.S. attacks on Spain’s colonies in the Pacific, and the demand for Cuban independence. Although it only lasted 10 weeks, the Cuban Republic, being the smaller fighting contingency, faced heavy losses, with casualties exceeding ten thousand. The ultimate result of this war was

English poet Rudyard Kipling was the genius behind the pen, initially writing the poem specifically for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, which was a celebration to mark her surpassing her grandfather as the longest running monarch in both Scottish, English, and British history. The poem was significantly altered from its original state, going from a prayer describing a powerful, unbroken fate between beings to a poem solely focused on the American colonization of the Philippines, after the Spanish American War. Many readers view this poem differently, with opinions ranging from a justification of imperialism as a noble enterprise, to an example of Eurocentric racism. Despite varying opinions, and different analytical standpoints, Kipling originally wrote the poem with the hope that it would be interpreted as a philanthropic

This viewpoint was only accepted by few, but it was also widely understood that certain steps needed to be taken in portions of central Africa and many other parts of the world. The colonial powers, consisting of Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Russia, Germany, Italy, and the United States, are personified as, “The White Man,” in the poem. The ‘White Man’ had a mutual goal to civilize and evangelize the barbaric nations, most of which had primitive governments, lack of community structures, and an absence of religion. The Philippines were a prime example of this, as the United States easily stymied the flow of revolution in the late 19th-early 20th century, after the United States received the territory from