ABSTRACT
Many people automatically associate Rudyard Kipling’s now notorious poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ with the British Empire. In fact, when Kipling wrote this infamous exhortation to the white man to take up his burden, a zealous battle cry for imperialism, he was addressing not the established British Empire but a nascent American one.1 It is an easy enough mistake to make, however, to assume that Kipling was speaking of British imperialism, as the British Empire was both historically and geographically far-reaching and Kipling himself was a poster boy of sorts for the British raj. Part of the reason for this common misconception may also be the unexpectedness of the notion of American colonialism itself. Colonialism, after all, does not square with the United States’ national rhetoric of freedom and democracy. Furthermore, the obscuring of Kipling’s original intents is not strange, as it could be read as symptomatic of a general suppression of America’s history as a colonial power in the early twentieth century. Unlike Great Britain, for instance, the United States neither promotes nor nurtures a conglomeration of former colonies like the British Commonwealth. Even during the years of American occupation, the Philippines was always offi cially referred to as a territory-never a colony.
