When Rudyard Kipling first published “The White Man’s Burden” in McClure’s Magazine in 1899, he had political influence on his mind. At the time, the United States was struggling to quash a war of national independence that had just broken out in the Philippines. This war began in another war’s wake. The previous year, with the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, the U.S. signed the Treaty of Paris (1898). This treaty allowed the U.S. to annex the Philippines along with the territories of Guam and Puerto Rico, all of which had previously belonged to Spain. When Filipino nationalists organized to resist this transfer of power, the U.S. responded with force. It was at this juncture that Kipling published “The White Man’s Burden,” which he subtitled “The United States and the Philippine Islands.” This subtitle clearly indicates the political context of Kipling’s poem, which presents an argument for the moral imperative of imperial expansion. The poem’s speaker adopts an exhortatory tone, repeatedly calling on the reader to “take up the White Man’s burden,” regardless of how difficult and thankless the speaker perceives the task to be. Kipling’s poem was so influential at the time of its publication that the controversial phrase “White Man’s burden” became a euphemism for imperial expansion.

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