Quotes from workThe White Man's Burden
The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands , by Rudyard Kipling, is a poem about the Philippine–American War , which exhorts the United States to assume colonial control of the Filipino people and their country.Kipling originally wrote the poem to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria , but it was replaced with the sombre poem "Recessional" , also a Kipling work about empire. He rewrote "The White Man's Burden" to encourage American colonisation and annexation of the Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago conquered in the three-month Spanish–American War . As a poet of imperialism, 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; nonetheless, American imperialists understood the phrase The white man's burden to justify imperial conquest as a mission-of-civilisation that is ideologically related to the continental-expansion philosophy of Manifest Destiny of the early 19th century.The title, the subject, and the themes of "The White Man's Burden" provoke accusations of advocacy of the Eurocentric racism inherent to the idea that, by way of industrialisation, the Western world delivers civilisation to the non-white peoples of the world.
