Starting in the 1800’s, great economic powers, mainly in Europe, were searching for land, resources, cheap labor, and ports and routes for trade. These powers such as Britain, France, The Netherlands, and Portugal fought for land in Africa, the Middle-East, and Southeast Asia. In the story Shooting An Elephant by George Orwell, Britain has control of a nation called Burma in Southeast Asia. This story maps the journey of a sub-divisional police officer, Orwell himself, as he tries to maintain power over the Burmese people during the attack of an elephant in must. Throughout the story, Orwell tells of the struggles of Imperialism and how it affected him, the main character, and everyone else. Due to Imperialism in Shooting An Elephant, a hierarchy was set in two distinct ways between the imperialist and the imperialized, and the system that was created had both positive and negative effects.

In the story by George Orwell, Orwell talked of himself as being the “lead actor of the piece” and the one who ran everything in his assigned Burmese town. This is true because he did have the weapons and the power to do whatever he pleased in Burma and he was the one who was called when help was needed. He was not the only one who had any power in Burma. All Europeans seemed to look down upon the ragged “yellow faced” Burmese people and it is shown that they had power because people who have power are hated and all the Europeans in Burma were jeered at and called names by the native people. This mentality of looking down upon the natives came from the racism in Europe about all the people who were less civilized than themselves. Although they sometimes felt sorry for the native people because of how they were taken over for the gain of another nation, the Europeans still hated the natives and acted as if they were better than the natives in these places like Burma because of the racism they had been taught. “With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny…upon the will of the prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.” This quote showed that although Orwell felt pity for the Burmese people, the racism and hatred taught to him as a trained British officer made him hate them and want to treat them like trash.

On the other hand, another hierarchy buried deep within the whole cast of this story shows a complete opposite set of leaders. In this case the leaders of both the Burmese people and the British Raj and officers were the Burmese people themselves. Orwell said, “but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and from … when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that is destroyed…he shall spend his life trying to impress the ‘natives’, and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him.” Orwell is saying here that although he possessed the guns and uniform, his only role in Burma was to try and make sure the Burmese people would respect him and not laugh at him; that he is only a figurehead there to do whatever the Burmese people want him to do. When Orwell was faced with a mad elephant and didn’t want to shoot it, he had to do it anyway because he could feel the force of the Burmese people pressuring him to do it. This does not mean that the natives physically force him to do anything because he does have the guns, but only that he is afraid of making a fool out of himself in front of the natives and that this drives him to do what they please.

Imperialism in general and that in Burma had both good and bad effects on the native people who were being imperialized. There were many bad effects that people in some areas still live with today. When the British went into Burma, they forced everyone there to work in mines or plantations, or made them get rubber from the rain forest. Those who wouldn’t work were jailed and often “bogged with bamboos.” Making the natives grow cash-crops and neglect their personal needs only hurt their economy and took away their freedom. This angered many groups like Buddhist Priests, the average Burman, and people who were forced to live near each other or share a border even though they hated each other. This caused them to show great hatred toward the British officers and people who enforced the work.

Although one often looks at the bad effects of imperialism, there are actually many good things that came out of imperialism as well. For example, many nations in Africa and Southeast Asia got a huge economic boost from imperialists taking over their countries or areas. These areas were civilized which stopped much fighting, introduced to new sanitation and economic technologies that hadn’t existed there before, and also introduced to the world trade as a place of great wealth.

showed how imperialism had both a simple and complex system of power that governed the way everything was done. The story also showed the advantages and disadvantages of imperialism to both the colonizer and the colonized as well. This story shows how Imperialism was much more complex than a ruler and ruled situation, but was in fact a situation of complex relationships that ended up beneficial to the people being imperialized. Although the only intention of imperialism was to conquer land and get resources to support newly industrialized nations, it helped spread industrialization, civilize the world, and discover new lands.