As we see in Rudyard Kipling's "The
Man Who Would Be King" (NAEL 8, 2.1794)
and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (NAEL 8, 2.1890),
empire-building might involve the most ruthless
exploitation of subject peoples, and the
imperialist might be violent, mercenary,
selfish, short-sighted, or outright stupid.
Yet Great Britain often represented imperialism
to itself in a highly idealized fashion.
When the British took over a territory, or
so the argument went, they brought civilization
to the barbarian, enlightenment to the heathen,
prosperity to the impoverished, law and social
order to the brutish primitive. While most
saw no reason to apologize for forwarding
British economic interests in the colonies,
imperialist expansion found further justification
in Britain's self-appointed mission of
spreading "civilization, commerce, and
Christianity" across the globe, in the
words of the famous explorer and missionary
David Livingstone.
Kipling's poem "The
White Man's Burden," written
to inspire brother imperialists across
the Atlantic, identifies the civilizing
mission as one to be undertaken by all
right-minded people of European descent.
But many believed that the British were
especially suited for the governing of
an Empire by virtue of their national,
racial, and cultural superiority. In his
lecture on "Imperial Duty," John
Ruskin praises the English as "a race
mingled of the best northern blood" and
enriched by "a thousand years of noble
history." Given these advantages,
England has not just the right, but a mandate
to expand: "she must found colonies
as fast and as far as she is able".
Joseph Chamberlain's lecture "The
True Conception of Empire" describes
the English as a "great governing
race" whose greatness is manifested
especially in the British "sense of
obligation" to the savage populations
under its benevolent rule.
Chamberlain distinguishes the
white "self-governing colonies" like
Canada and Australia, identified as more-or-less
equal partners within the Empire, from the "tropical" colonies
in which indigenous populations greatly outnumbered
the white settlers. These populations were
seen as backward, ignorant, and culturally
and spiritually bankrupt — desperately
in need of guidance from the superior white
man. In his "Minute
on Indian Education," Thomas Babington
Macaulay argues that India's cultural
inferiority is so pronounced that Indians
should not be allowed to gain literacy in
their own native languages. Macaulay hopes
to form an anglicized native ruling class, "a
class of persons, Indian in blood and colour,
but English in taste, in opinions, in morals,
and in intellect," that would serve
as an intermediary between the British and
the mass of colonial subjects. In Kipling,
by contrast, the gulf between colonizer and
colonized remains seemingly unbridgeable:
the "new-caught" subject races
are "sullen," barbaric, and ungrateful,
and the white man's civilizing mission
is a stern and thankless one.