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Abstract

One intriguing aspect of western colonisation at the turn of the nineteenth century in the South Pacific is the development within the US of a distinctly ‘Old World’ imperial imaginary. This happened after the Spanish-American War of 1898 through which the US acquired extra-territorial possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific-the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’. This essay explores this transition from one phase of colonialism to another through the work of two prominent authors who lived and worked in the region during this tumultuous period: Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London.

Keywords

David Grief Falesa Kipling US imperialism White man’s burden

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References

Robert Louis Stevenson , ‘The Beach of Falesa’, 1892, from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories, ed. Jenni Calder ( London, Penguin , 1979). All subsequent references are to this edition.

Jack London, Captain David Grief (Honolulu, Mutual Publishing, nd). All subsequent references are to this edition.

Vanessa Smith , Literary Culture and the Pacific: nineteenth-century textual encounters ( Cambridge, Cambridge University Press , 1998), p. 167-167.

Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas, 1896 (London, William Heinemann, 1924), p. 39.

Indeed, as a narrative device, Wiltshire anticipates Conrad’s Marlow in its ability to capture the particular idiom and outlook of a particular type of colonial subject. See Robert Irwin Hillier , The South Sea Fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson ( New York, Peter Lang , 1989), p. 160-160.

A local word simply meaning man, but used by westerners at the time with much the same sense as ‘nigger’.

Cited by Robert Crawford, The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 79.

Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff , Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in South Africa ( Chicago, University of Chicago Press , 1991), vol. 1, pp. 12-13.

J. A. Hobson , Imperialism: a study, 1902 ( Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press , 1965), p. 20-20.

10.

Republished using the original text as Captain David Grief (Honolulu, Mutual Publishing, nd). Subsequent references are to this edition.

11.

Jeanne Campbell Reesman , Jack London: a study of the shorter fiction ( New York, Twayne Publishers , 1999), p. 151-151.

12.

Richard Phillips , Mapping Men and Empire: geography of adventure ( London and New York, Routledge , 1997), p. 83-83.

13.

Rudyard Kipling , ‘White Man’s Burden: the United States and the Philippine islands’, in The Works of Rudyard Kipling ( Ware, Wordsworth , 1994), pp. 323-334.

14.

Nicholas Thomas , ‘The force of ethnology: origins and significance of the Melanesia/Polynesia division’ , Current Anthropology (Vol. 30, no. 1, 1989), p. 31-31 .

15.

Frederick Jackson Turner , ‘The significance of the frontier in American history’, 1893, from Writing and America, eds Gavin Cologne-Brookes , Neil Sammells and David Tims ( London, Longman , 1996), p. 271-271.

16.

Thorstein Veblen , The Theory of the Leisure Class: an economic study of institutions ( New York, Macmillan , 1899), p. 44-44.

17.

Reesman, Jack London, op. cit., p. 156.

Colonial culture in the Pacific,in Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London

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