>Yeah I know about Kipling, but I wonder how representative that was, and
>where it stood in the history of British colonial narratives. Surely that
>sort of stuff didn't emerge at the first imperial moment, did it?
and Henry wrote:
>CHRSITIANITY!
>Bringing God to the godless orientals.
>All over Asia, Chritian missionaries were the vanguards of imperialism.
>The weapon was opium, the pretext was trade and the political strategy was
divide
>and rule.
>Capitalism came much later.
If you take the invasion of Ireland in 1170 as England's "first imperial moment" it is notable that Henry II used a papal license (obtained somewhat earlier) to justify his action, the pope who gave it being, for the only time, an Englishman and Rome being dissatisfied with the Irish variant of Christianity. Henry was to "enlarge the boundaries of the church, to retstrain the downward course of vice, to correct evil habits and introduce virtue and the increase the Christian religion." Compare to Kipling's "Your new-caught , sullen peoples,
Half -devil and half-child.. ".. No opium then, but lots of divide and rule, the Irish kings being at odds with each other. I don't know if Henry II ever claimed the sort of (Christ-like?) self-sacrifice that Kipling got into but certainly "muscular Christianity" was a staple of the English public schools of the Victorian era and quite a few of the leading British imperialist apologists (e.g., Leo Amery, AJ Balfour, not to mention popularizers such as Henty) seem not only to have preached it but to have believed it themselves.
K.Mickey