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This chapter examines the U.S. reception of Rudyard Kipling's poem, “The White Man's Burden” (1899), in a variety of forms such as newspaper opinions, scientific treatises, political speeches, and parodies. This examination demonstrates that rather than intensifying Anglo-Saxonism or a racialized linkage between whiteness, U.S. nationalism, and overseas expansion, the poem instead exacerbated anxieties about the meaning and importance of whiteness for a U.S. global mission. While some satirists demonstrated the poem's hypocrisy by pointing out the onomantithesis in Kipling's binary treatment of black beneficiaries and white servants, for some readers Kipling's binary was not deceptively reversed but troublingly collapsed in a context where the meaning and stability of whiteness was in question. As part of the inquiry into racialization and empire building, the chapter shows the importance of literature both in scripting and in interrogating fictions of racial identity.

In the nineteenth century, a sizeable Chinese labor cum trade diasporic community was established in Indochina, where they occupied a dominant position in the local economy until the arrival of the French. Upon the completion of colonial conquest and pacification in the 1880s, the French embarked on the mise en valeur of their new possession by setting up a state-sponsored and state-backed “imperial diaspora.” This chapter discusses cultural practices of the Chinese and the French in Indochina, and shows that the Manichean schema not only fails to account for the complexity of the colonial reality, it has also created a form of the “White Man's Burden” that differs in an interesting way from the one eulogized by Rudyard Kipling, the British imperial bard.

This chapter opens with the involvement of Cecil Rhodes in the failed Jameson Raid of 1895; on Kipling’s second visit to South Africa in 1898 he saw a great deal of Rhodes, travelling with him to the diamond mines at Kimberley, and on to the newly-acquired territory of Rhodesia, a journey that inspired two at least of the Just So stories. He became an ever-keener imperialist, and wrote, ‘The White Man’s Burden’. Mary Kingsley particularly disliked it. In this chapter Sir Edward Burne-Jones dies and six months later the Kiplings travel to New York, where Rudyard and Josephine, his beloved daughter, fall ill with pneumonia; Josephine dies. When war is declared in October 1899, Kipling leaps at the distraction from his profound grief, and rushes out a poem – ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ – to raise money for the servicemen being sent to South Africa and their dependents.