Explain the implied assumption underlying the statement in the first sentence.

"IN MOULMEIN, IN LOWER BURMA, I was hated by large numbers of people--the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me," George Orwell writes as the first line to "Shooting an Elephant." He makes several assumptions as he leaps into the story. The first is that his readers would know that Burma at that time was an English colony. From that single line, readers would have been able to "slot" the narrator into a social position, just as "working in Silicon Valley" would, today, suggest a set of assumptions about a person's involvement in the high tech world that would include the person being well educated, young and well paid.

Contemporary audiences in England at the time would have understood that the narrator was one of the many socially marginal upper-class, well-educated people who took jobs in the colonies as the lustre faded from the British empire and as England began to offer fewer opportunities for its young people. The word "Burma" would have been a clue, but so would the phrase about it being the only time in his life he was important. People knew that being British in a colony added status just because the English were considered superior to the native peoples. The audience also would have a clue that the narrator was hated by the natives, not his fellow ex-patriots, and a foreshadowing that his power would sit uncomfortably on him, as, in fact it does in the story.