Indigenous responses to state expansion, 1750 to 1900

What the exam asks

Expect the exam to test Causation and Comparison across four distinct indigenous responses to state expansion:

1. Anticolonial nationalism: Questioning imperial political authority and forming shared national identities.
2. Direct armed resistance: Fighting imperial forces from within or against encroaching borders.
3. New states on the peripheries: Building centralized states on the edges of expanding empires.
4. Religiously inspired rebellions: Mobilizing prophetic or spiritual beliefs to expel foreign rulers.

Core ideas

Questions of political authority and nationalism

Imperial rule often unintentionally united previously divided groups. Exposure to Enlightenment ideals of self-determination, combined with shared grievances over taxation, racial hierarchy, and land seizure, led colonized peoples to question the legitimacy of foreign rule. In South Asia, Western-educated elites formed the Indian National Congress (1885), initially petitioning for greater representation within the British administration and laying the foundation for modern anticolonial nationalism.