dual socities

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By the end of the 19th century, European free trade imperialism included much of Asia and Africa within a swiftly growing world mercantilist economy. Europeans entered these uncharted areas with the intention of dominating the indigenous society, which swiftly alienated the two societies and formed new dual, segregated societies. Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” and George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” outlined this social order and class rivalry presented between the British Empire and the native people. Gandhi’s letter to Lord Irwin supported this view as well, by looking into the dual societies within the context that the British isolated the native society from the economic hegemony that the British enjoyed. Together, Kipling, Orwell, and Gandhi provided a detailed account of the British prejudice within dual colonial society through the social and economic hegemony they held.
Orwell’s essay demonstrated the British supremacy against the colonized as it revealed how insignificant their deaths were. Being a police superintendent in Burma, Orwell was called when an otherwise tame elephant ran rampant. In his search for the animal, he stumbled upon a dead Burman, who was trampled by the elephant, and referred to him as a “black Dravidian coolie.” Oxford dictionary defined a coolie as “an offensive term for an unskilled native labourer in an Asian country.” At the end of the essay, Orwell tracked down the elephant and killed it. When the discussion arose about the shooting, a young British man said he was in the wrong by justifying that even “an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie”. Yet, Orwell stood by his actions, as he stated “I was very glad that the coolie had been killed…it gave me a suffic...

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...rgely, Kipling believed that if imperialist nations like the British Empire did not take over, utter chaos would commence without civilizing conquerors.
The white overloads continued to reign supreme as they expected the colonial subjects to avidly embrace the violent, debasing imperialist desires. However, the quixotic Englishmen that did venture into these unknown lands to civilize the natives became internally torn. George Orwell dehumanized a man as an alibi to his killing, but still understood the natives’ attitudes as reasonable. Yet, this mutually shared distaste for each other both fueled and necessitated a barrier between the two cultures. This dual society painted a portrait of high tension and developed repercussions of calls of injustice and uprisings that eventually expelled the British Empire from India and Africa and gave the nations self-dominion.

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