Essay On The Age Of Imperialism

Empires of the past had long taken to conquering foreign lands for the sake of national glory and power among other things. This trend reached a new stratum of efficiency and competition during the age of Imperialism. In the late 1800s, Europe was a continent of nervous and proud empires with a mistrust of others. As such, when King Leopold of Belgium sent envoys to the Congo, there was a great flurry in Europe to open trade there as well. Due to the fertile resources in Africa, and the superior military power of Europe, European imperial powers began conquests in the African continent. This merited a variety of concerns and opinions from Europeans intellectuals and citizens at the time. The authors Bagehot, Conrad, and Kipling were some of the most vocal during this Age of Imperialism.
Walter Bagehot’s Physics and Politics gave an excuse for European Imperialism. A liberal in a classical sense, Bagehot used the idea of cultural meritocracy to justify the expansion of European powers. Bagehot makes a clear distinction between the civilized man and the savage,
Kipling’s infamous poem The White Man’s Burden, tells the European world of the sacrifices that they must go through in order to ‘save’ the, “…new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.” He urges the civilized to toil like a, “…serf and sweeper…” and to sacrifice themselves to the bettering of the rest of the world. This idea of self-sacrifice for the sake of helping those deemed less fortunate is quite similar to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Romanticism. Kipling’s poem is quite the Romantic rallying cry, as it called on the civilized of society to help those savages of the world. Because of this vision, and because he thought that he was saving the savages of the world, Kipling supported the imperialism of