ABSTRACT
Nationalism already had a lengthy history by the time it began to appear among colonised peoples in the Empire. Historians both of the early modern and the modern periods have claimed that the rise of the ‘nation state’ is peculiar to the era they study. In the nineteenth century, signifi cant changes in European boundaries created the modern countries of Italy and Germany, while the First World War redrew the map of central and of eastern Europe in signifi cant ways. Much of this change was achieved as a result of military and imperial activity, but there was also a considerable groundswell of popular sentiment about consolidating national identities. Colonial versions of these nationalist leanings often differed quite radically from those seen in Europe, but they too emphasised a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate rule. In an era in which western imperial powers were embracing ever more democratic forms of government, the profound lack of indigenous representation in the majority of the colonies looked more and more out of step with the political tenor of the age. This is not to suggest that the forms of nationalism that took hold in British colonies were purely western imports. There were certainly western infl uences at work, but shrewd activists were also skilled at reinventing nationalist sentiments in an idiom more likely to appeal in
their own populations. As a result, we see a lively variety of nationalist movements in different parts of the Empire: what linked them, for the most part, was that they increasingly challenged the validity of British colonial rule. Anti-colonial nationalism was a specifi c form of nationalism yoked to a critique of colonial governance, but though it often helped move the process of decolonisation along, it was by no means the only factor in that process. British offi cials took anti-colonial nationalism very seriously, and responses to it were often vigorous and punitive.
