Western Imperialism: Justification vs. Colonial Reality
This essay examines the extent to which imperialism was perceived positively by Western colonizers and destructively by colonized peoples in Africa and Asia. Drawing on literary, philosophical, and historical sources — including Rudyard Kipling, Edward Said's Orientalism, Frantz Fanon, and thinkers from Aristotle to John Stuart Mill — the paper traces how Western powers consistently justified territorial occupation through ideologies of racial and cultural superiority, religious duty, and civilizing mission. It also acknowledges rare dissenting voices within Western culture and contrasts overt nineteenth-century colonialism with twentieth-century neocolonialism, ultimately arguing that self-serving rationalization was the dominant framework through which Western imperialism was understood and defended.
- Introduction: Two Visions of Imperialism: Kipling's rare dissent amid widespread Western approval
- Justifying the Unjustifiable: Western Rationalizations: How perpetrators reframed conquest as benevolence
- Historical Precedents for Imperial Justification: Rome, Napoleon, Hitler, and McKinley as precedents
- Racial Ideology and the Dehumanization of the Colonized: Said, Fanon, and zoological depictions of the colonized
- Literary Representations of Colonizer and Colonized: Conrad, Camus, and Kipling's Kim as imperial texts
- Dissenting Voices Within the West: Kipling, Forster, and Las Casas as rare critics
- Conclusion: The Persistence of Imperial Rationalization: Self-serving rationalization endures into the present
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What makes this paper effective
- It marshals an impressively wide range of sources — classical philosophy (Aristotle), Victorian literature (Kipling, Forster, Conrad), postcolonial theory (Said, Fanon), and political speeches (Ferry, Lugard, McKinley) — to build a coherent argument across historical periods.
- The paper is analytically honest: it acknowledges dissenting Western voices rather than presenting a monolithic picture, which strengthens rather than weakens the central claim.
- The pivot from nineteenth-century colonialism to twentieth-century neocolonialism effectively shows the argument's contemporary relevance without overstating it.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of counterexample and concession: by naming Kipling, Forster, and Las Casas as critics of empire, the author pre-empts the obvious objection that not all Westerners supported imperialism, then uses that concession to reinforce how exceptional those voices were. This move — acknowledge, concede, then reframe — is a hallmark of well-constructed argumentative writing.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a close reading of Kipling's poem to frame the central tension, then moves outward through historical precedent (Rome, Bonaparte, Hitler, McKinley), theoretical frameworks (Said's Orientalism, Fanon on dehumanization), literary evidence (Conrad, Camus, Forster), and philosophical grounding (Aristotle, Mill). It closes by returning to Kipling's singularity, creating a satisfying circular structure that reinforces the thesis.
Introduction: Two Visions of Imperialism
Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden" functions as an ironic condemnation of imperialism. While most Westerners of the era viewed imperialism as a necessary fact of life and a boon to so-called "savages," Kipling was ahead of his time in seeing the white man as simply one more race among many populating the world. In his view, the white man's greed and folly perpetuated needless wars and the occupation of other peoples' lands, amounting to the theft of their wives, children, property, and wealth — all for the colonizers' own benefit.
Kipling, however, was unusual. Most Westerners not only saw themselves as doing their duty but many defined their actions as charity. They believed they were educating the illiterate, teaching the "savage" the ways of Jesus Christ, showing the "primitive" how to till and cultivate his soil and manage his affairs, and, in every way, positively influencing an inferior race through the gentility and superior intelligence of a higher one. Others admitted a degree of self-interest but clung to the same rationalizations: they were benefiting the inferior savage by occupying his land.
That this was the common attitude of the period is clearly evident in literature that has since become classic. Pollyanna and Tom Sawyer, for instance, both contain scenes in which townspeople meet to discuss funding missionaries who are sacrificing themselves to teach God's word to primitive peoples. The belief that non-Western peoples were primitive was deeply internalized by ordinary Westerners. Many genuinely believed, for example, that Africans were cannibals. Indeed, the concept that the racial "other" was less intelligent and biologically inferior was lent scientific credibility by social Darwinism, which popularized such notions to a considerable extent.
Justifying the Unjustifiable: Western Rationalizations
It may be that the very act of seizing another people's land and imposing one's own laws and customs upon them is so horrific and palpably inexcusable that the perpetrators could not deny it outright — denial was impossible — but instead were compelled to justify it. Rationalization, in other words, became the mechanism by which colonizers reconciled their actions with any sense of moral decency.
Justification of imperialism has long been a feature of Western history, and it consistently followed the same pattern: the conquered were presented as beneficiaries rather than victims.
Sources
Aristotle, and C.D.C. Reeve (translator). (1998). Politics. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.
Bartolomé de Las Casas. (1550). Apologetic History of the Indies. Columbia University. http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/lascasas.htm
Fanon, F. (2004). The Wretched of the Earth. New York, NY: Grove Press.
Fromkin, D. (1989). A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. New York, NY: Avon.
Said, E. (2003). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Cary Nelson, and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. (1988). "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 271–313 in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Mill, J.S. A President in Council the Best Government for India. Library of Liberty. http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=264&chapter=21938&layout=html&Itemid=27
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