Joseph Conrad and Imperialism

For this post I wanted to go into detail on how I feel that Joseph Conrad wrote “An Outpost of Progress” as a way to call out the British government on what he saw as the mishandling of their colonies. I think that the two white characters represent the British agents and how more often than not they were clueless about running and managing far flung colonies. Conrad in his younger years was a sailor for both the French and British Merchant navies and in both instances traveled to the far east and when he was in the British Merchant Navy he spent some time working on a river boat in Africa.

                I think that Conrad also used Kayerts and Carlier to show how tenuous the connection between ruler and the ruled really were. The white men wielded all of the “power” for two reasons, the first being the supplies coming from other parts of the empire and the second was the fact that the natives believed them to be powerful. I think that Conrad made this connection thin to display how on the outside things may seem to be in order but when the rulers are far from home and have a support system nearly wholly dependent on the ruled it would not take very much to completely upend everything and have the whole endeavor end in disaster.