Who is Kipling referring to in the first stanza of "The White Man's Burden," with the lines "Your new-caught sullen peoples, Half devil and half...

In the first stanza of “The White Man’s Burden,” Rudyard Kipling is referring to one specific group of colonized people when he talks about the “new-caught, sullen peoples.”  This group is the Filipinos. However, we can also read this as his commentary on all imperialized people.

Kipling wrote this poem as his way of responding when the United States took control of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.  To his way of thinking, this was the first time that the US had imperialized another country and he wrote the poem as his way of welcoming them to the (metaphorical) club of imperial powers.  This means that the Filipinos are the specific group of “new-found, sullen peoples” that the poem refers to.

However, Kipling was also talking about imperialized people in general when he wrote these lines.  They were not all “new-caught,” but he felt that all of the people of these lands were basically uncivilized and perhaps only partly human.  The poem discusses what he sees as the characteristics of these non-white, subjugated people. 

While this line can refer to all imperialized people, perhaps the best answer is to say that it refers most particularly to the Filipinos since they were the group of people who were “new-caught” at the time that he wrote this poem.