history

stability to a society that had been rent by civil war. By the early nineteenth century, British control had been con- solidated and led to a relatively honest and efficient government that in many respects operated to the benefit of the average Indian. One of the benefits of the period was the heightened attention given to education. Through the efforts of the British administrator Thomas Babington Macaulay, a new school system was established to train the children of Indian elites, and the British civil service examination was introduced (see the box on p. 519).

The instruction of young girls also expanded, with the primary purpose of making them better wives and mothers for the educated male population. In 1875, a Madras medical college accepted its first female student.

British rule also brought an end to some of the more inhumane aspects of Indian tradition. The practice of sati was outlawed, and widows were legally permitted to re- marry. The British also attempted to put an end to the endemic brigandage (known as thuggee, which gave rise to the English word thug) that had plagued travelers in

OPPOSING VIEWPOINTS

WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, BLACK MAN’S SORROW

One of the justifications for modern imperialism

was the notion that the supposedly ‘‘more ad-

vanced’’ white peoples had a moral responsibility

to raise ‘‘ignorant’’ native peoples to a higher level

of civilization. Few captured this notion better than the British

poet Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) in his famous poem The

White Man’s Burden. His appeal, directed to the United States,

became one of the most famous sets of verses in the English-

speaking world.

That sense of moral responsibility, however, was often mis-

placed or, even worse, laced with hypocrisy. All too often, the

consequences of imperial rule were detrimental to everyone liv-

ing under colonial authority. Few observers described the de-

structive effects of Western imperialism on the African people

as well as Edmund Morel, a British journalist whose book The

Black Man’s Burden pointed out some of the more harmful

aspects of colonialism in the Belgian Congo.

Rudyard Kipling, The White Man’s Burden

Take up the White Man’s burden---

Send forth the best ye breed---

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild---

Your new-caught sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man’s burden---

In patience to abide,

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride;

By open speech and simple,

An hundred times made plain

To seek another’s profit,

And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s burden---

The savage wars of peace---

Fill full the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

The end for others sought,

Watch Sloth and heathen Folly

Bring all your hopes to nought.

Edmund Morel, The Black Man’s Burden

It is [the Africans] who carry the ‘‘Black man’s burden.’’ They have not

withered away before the white man’s occupation. Indeed . . . Africa has

ultimately absorbed within itself every Caucasian and, for that matter,

every Semitic invader, too. In hewing out for himself a fixed abode in

Africa, the white man has massacred the African in heaps. The African

has survived, and it is well for the white settlers that he has. . . .

What the partial occupation of his soil by the white man has

failed to do; what the mapping out of European political ‘‘spheres of

influence’’ has failed to do; what the Maxim and the rifle, the slave

gang, labour in the bowels of the earth and the lash, have failed to

do; what imported measles, smallpox and syphilis have failed to do;

whatever the overseas slave trade failed to do; the power of modern

capitalistic exploitation, assisted by modern engines of destruction,

may yet succeed in accomplishing.

For from the evils of the latter, scientifically applied and

enforced, there is no escape for the African. Its destructive effects

are not spasmodic; they are permanent. In its permanence resides its

fatal consequences. It kills not the body merely, but the soul. It

breaks the spirit. It attacks the African at every turn, from every

point of vantage. It wrecks his polity, uproots him from the land,

invades his family life, destroys his natural pursuits and occupations,

claims his whole time, enslaves him in his own home.

Q According to Kipling, why should Western nations take up

the ‘‘white man’s burden,’’ as described in this poem? What

was the ‘‘black man’s burden,’’ in the eyes of Edmund Morel?

518 C H A P T E R 2 1 THE HIGH TIDE OF IMPERIALISM

remnants of the Mughal dynasty, which had supported the mutiny; responsibility for governing the subcontinent was then turned over to the crown.

Like the Sepoy Rebellion, traditional resistance movements usually met with little success. Peasants armed with pikes and spears were no match for Western armies possessing the most terrifying weapons then known to

human society. In a few cases, such as the revolt of the Mahdi at Khartoum, the natives were able to defeat the invaders temporarily. But such successes were rare, and the late nineteenth century witnessed the seemingly in- exorable march of the Western powers, armed with the Gatling gun (the first rapid-fire weapon and the precursor of the modern machine gun), to mastery of the globe.

COMPARATIVE ESSAY

IMPERIALISM: THE BALANCE SHEET

Few periods of history are as controversial

among scholars and casual observers as

the era of imperialism. To defenders of the

colonial enterprise like the poet Rudyard

Kipling, imperialism was the ‘‘white man’s burden,’’ a

disagreeable but necessary phase in the evolution of

human society, lifting up the toiling races from tradition

to modernity and bringing an end to poverty, famine,

and disease (see the box on p. 518).

Critics took exception to such views, portraying imperialism

as a tragedy of major proportions. The insatiable drive of

the advanced economic powers for access to raw materials

and markets created an exploitative environment that trans-

formed the vast majority of colonial peoples into a perma-

nent underclass, while restricting the benefits of modern

technology to a privileged few. Kipling’s ‘‘white man’s bur-

den’’ was dismissed as a hypocritical gesture to hoodwink

the naive and salve the guilty feelings of those who recog-

nized imperialism for what it was---a savage act of rape.

Defenders of the colonial experiment sometimes con-

cede that there were gross inequities in the colonial system

but point out that there was a positive side to the experi-

ence as well. The expansion of markets and the beginnings

of a modern transportation and communications network, while

bringing few immediate benefits to the colonial peoples, laid the

groundwork for future economic growth. At the same time, the in-

troduction of new ways of looking at human freedom, the relation-

ship between the individual and society, and democratic principles

set the stage for the adoption of such ideas after the restoration of

independence following World War II. Finally, the colonial experi-

ence offered a new approach to the traditional relationship between

men and women. Although colonial rule was by no means uni-

formly beneficial to the position of women in African and Asian so-

cieties, growing awareness of the struggle for equality by women in

the West offered their counterparts in the colonial territories a

weapon to fight against the long-standing barriers of custom and

legal discrimination.

How, then, are we to draw up a final balance sheet on the era

of Western imperialism? Both sides have good points to make, but

perhaps the critics have the best of the argument. Although the co-

lonial authorities sometimes did provide the beginnings of an infra-

structure that could eventually serve as the foundation of an

advanced industrial society, all too often they sought to prevent the

rise of industrial and commercial sectors in their colonies that

might provide competition to producers in the home country. So-

phisticated, age-old societies that could have been left to respond to

the technological revolution in their own way were thus squeezed

dry of precious national resources under the false guise of a ‘‘civiliz-

ing mission.’’ As the sociologist Clifford Geertz remarked in his

book Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in

Indonesia, the tragedy is not that the colonial peoples suffered

through the colonial era but that they suffered for nothing.

Q Based on the information available to you, do you think

the imperialistic practices of the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries can be justified on moral or political grounds?

Gateway to India. Built in the Roman imperial style by the British to commemorate the visit to India of King George V and Queen Mary in 1911, the Gateway to India was erected at the water’s edge in the harbor of Bombay (now Mumbai), India’s greatest port city. For thousands of British citizens arriving in India, the Gateway to India was the first view of their new home and a symbol of the power and majesty of the British raj.

� c W il li a m

J . D u ik e r

536 C H A P T E R 2 1 THE HIGH TIDE OF IMPERIALISM