Question

“Take up the White Man’s burden— The savage wars of peace— Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease.” (Source: Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden”) Kipling’s poem received its rationale from which of the following nineteenth-century philosophies?

(A) Laissez-faire economics.
(B) Conservatism.
(C) Romanticism.
(D) Liberalism.
(E) Social Darwinism.

Answer 1

(e) Social Darwinism.

Social Darwinism claims that the ideas of natural selection also apply to politics and society, this was what fueled 19th century imperialism. It was the idea of survival of the fittest and White Man's Burden plays into that by claiming the superiority of the white man and its need to help the "savages".