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My paper studies the issue of power and empire in the colonialist discourses of Rudyard Kipling, Edward Morgan Forster and Joseph Conrad. It focuses on the consolidation of the English imperial power in the Orient at the expense of the native power structures. Therefore, two main interrelated issues are developed. First, the writers celebrate the encroachment of the English political power in the Orient. Second, they deny native rules by their focus on the idea of Oriental despotism and misrule as the essential factors that incite the decimation of the native rule. This process of denying the native authority is accompanied by the subject people's obedience to the colonial authority. I have concluded my paper with drawing parallels with contemporary issues, analysing an official discourse by George W. Bush as an instance. In his "Iraq War Discourse" (2003), Bush denies native authority in Iraq and reiterates nineteenth century Orientalist discourse about Oriental despotism and its replacements by the blessings of Western "democracy".

This paper has studied the issue that The American in Algiers (1797) is an abolitionist poem. As the poem is anonymously published by an American writer, it is read from a new historicist and cultural materialist perspective. Therefore, it is considered in the light of other American writings, literary or not, that were produced in the 1790s and dealt with the captives of Algiers crisis or slavery in the United States along with the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence. The point is that the poem appropriates the crisis of the so-called captivity and enslavement of American citizens in Algiers to appeal against black slavery in the United States. This is achieved through drawing analogies between the political and religious factors behind the slavery practice both in Algiers and the United States as well as revealing the inhumanity of the practice. Doing so allows the poet raise abolitionist concern on the part of the Americans, who are outraged by the enslavement of their citizens in Algiers but carry on exploiting black slaves in their own soil.

Borrowing concepts from Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), this article argues that Rudyard Kipling holds the same views on native rule in India as Alexandre Dumas does on Algerian structures of government. Both regard native rule as a paradigm of 'Oriental despotism,' which Orientalist scholars attribute to Oriental structures of power. Dumas asserts that Algerians owe their 'misgovernment' to the political influence of their late Turkish conqueror. Kipling contrasts native 'misrule' with enlightened British rule in order to legitimate British encroachment in India. Besides, both agree that native misgovernment fosters the spread of corruption and violence among their subjects.