How does Rudyard Kipling articulate this argument in “The White Mans Burden”?
For instance, how does he characterize the white man and the people he is to subjugate? • John Ruskin’s “Imperial Duty” and Joseph Chamberlain’s “The True Conception of Empire” are more concerned with British imperial rights and duties than the “white man’s burden” in general. Compare their nationalist argument to Kipling’s racial one. What assumptions about national and racial identity do they share? Both “Imperial Duty” and “The True Conception of Empire” are far more idealistic in tone than Kipling’s poem. What different rhetorical strategies are at work in the three texts, and what goals do they share in common? • Compare Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education,” which focuses on the cultural superiority of the British, to Benjamin Kidd’s The Control of the Tropics, which describes European evolutionary superiority. How is Kidd’s argument about biology also an argument about culture? • Critics of British imperialism challenge its enabling ideology by arguing that im
