"Bearing the Burden" (#274, Topic H)

Reading Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2002) at the Library of Congress today, I could not help being agitated by many of its comments. On the Opium War, which was the main purpose of my reading it, the author, a professor at Oxford, covers it in only one paragraph (in a 400+ page book). A key sentence and half is the following: "The Opium Wars of 1841 and 1856 were, of course, about much more than opium. The Illustrated London News portrayed the 1841 war as a crusade to introduce the benefits of free trade ..." (pp 166-7) Of course, free trade -- particularly free trade in opium -- must be defended at all cost. Too bad these good old days are gone forever -- as the author reluctantly acknowledges in the book's title and frankly admits in the concluding chapter. "The British Empire is long dead; ... The great creditor became a debtor. ... British imperial expansion changed their [sic] direction in the 1950s [from emigration to immigration]. As for the missionary impulse that had sent thousands of young men and women around the world preaching Christianity and the gospel of cleanliness, that too dwindled, along with public attendance at church" (p 358). What are lessons to be learned? One, "empire as a form of international government can work." (p 362) Two, "the United States has -- whether it admits it or not -- taken up some kind of global burden just as Kipling urged ... in the name of liberty, even when its own self-interest is manifestly uppermost." (p 369-70) The burden talked about by Rudyard Kipling (whom the author praised as "the Empire's greatest poet," is the so-called white man's burden. I have a standing objection to the word white, since white is a color (#?); change the first two words to caucasian. Aside from that, I would add an a, so that the phrase now reads: white man's a burden. As a group, caucasians waste too much of the world's resources; they are by far the world's greatest debtors -- they do not (and cannot) bear the world's burden; they are the world's burden.