What is really Important Here - White Man’s Burden

What is really Important Here -

White Man’s Burden

So far…

• Strategic - the geopolitical situation within Europe.

• Economic - was it in the specific interests of finance capitalist to expand

• Today, very briefly we will look at a third explanation – and that is the moral.

• Did the colonizing powers of New Imperialism actually believe that what they were doing was a virtuous undertaking.

The Dilemma

• The colonizing countries underwent an era of Enlightenment and political revolution to produce systems that were essentially democratic.

• Why then would they simultaneously seek to oppress?

• Answer (maybe) the civilizing mission. • Racist and offensive to our modern sensibilities–

meant that imperialism was actually a service and even a duty to the colonized people.

Rudyard Kipling and “White Man’s Burden”

• Rudyard Kipling says of the Filipinos :Your new caught peoples, Half-devil, half-child. But he also describes the task of colonizing the lands as a duty, a thankless task – but, he argues, a moral one.

Missionzation

• “The Missionary’s Bride” romantically eulogizes the role of female missionaries is it a real calling to do good?

• Is it racial pride and arrogance?• Alice Conklin, writing in 1997, corrects the over-

swing, her argument is that it can be both – the many leaders did actually believe that what they were doing was absolutely the best thing for the indigenous peoples– but, and it is an important but, they did not realize that what they were doing was also inherently racist.

Cromer’s Egypt and al-Sayyid’s Egypt