The themes of Kipling's short stories have also been criticized by contemporaries and increasingly by later critics and readers as simple-minded and even pernicious. He often seems to honor white men and Western technology as agents of a desirable dominion over less-progressive peoples and parts of the world. He has been read as the eulogist of an oligarchy of effective administrators, soldiers, engineers, doctors, and an occasional journalist who belong, formally or informally, to a club almost always closed to women. Such men are also almost always British, bred in the schools and ethical code of a professional middle class in which they learned how to obey the law that work be honorable and honest while making up their own rules for getting the job done.
These assessments are just but incomplete. From the beginning, especially in his short stories, Kipling wrote as powerfully, and more often, of the waste and cost of the work of empire as he did of its efficiencies. He was always aware of the impermanence of dominion, the inevitable decline and succession of empires. He knew that Western perspectives--sometimes he even seemed to recognize that masculine perspectives--were inescapably limited.
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