white man's burden
English
Etymology
From the poem The White Man's Burden (published 1899) by Rudyard Kipling.
Noun
- The supposed responsibility of European people to govern and care for their colonial subjects
- 1915 October 6, Lewis Ransome Freeman, “Germany's Exit From Africa”, in The World's Work[1], volume XXX:
- Germany's appearance as a colonizing power in Africa was greeted in no unfriendly spirit by either France or Great Britain. Each of the latter felt that it was already possessed of about all it could comfortably look after, and both realized that another shoulder under "The White Man's Burden" in the Dark Continent might make the load easier for all.
- 1959, Anthony Burgess, Beds in the East (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 609:
- So into at least one state troops poured, a battalion of decent National Service lads, to continue to carry, posthumously as it must be supposed, the White Man's Burden.
Translations
supposed responsibility of whites
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