Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Maps
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The first century of British colonial rule: social revolution or social stagnation?
- 2 Privileged land tenure in village India in the early nineteenth century
- 3 Agrarian society and the Pax Britannica in northern India in the early nineteenth century
- 4 The land revenue systems of the North-Western Provinces and Bombay Deccan 1830–80: ideology and the official mind
- 5 Traditional resistance movements and Afro-Asian nationalism: the context of the 1857 Mutiny Rebellion
- 6 Nawab Walidad Khan and the 1857 Struggle in the Bulandshahr district
- 7 Rural revolt in the Great Rebellion of 1857 in India: a study of the Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar districts
- 8 Traditional elites in the Great Rebellion of 1857: some aspects of rural revolt in the upper and central Doab
- 9 The structure of landholding in Uttar Pradesh 1860–1948
- 10 Dynamism and enervation in North Indian agriculture: the historical dimension
- 11 Peasants, moneylenders and colonial rule: an excursion into Central India
- 12 The return of the peasant to South Asian history
- Glossary
- Index
5 - Traditional resistance movements and Afro-Asian nationalism: the context of the 1857 Mutiny Rebellion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Maps
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The first century of British colonial rule: social revolution or social stagnation?
- 2 Privileged land tenure in village India in the early nineteenth century
- 3 Agrarian society and the Pax Britannica in northern India in the early nineteenth century
- 4 The land revenue systems of the North-Western Provinces and Bombay Deccan 1830–80: ideology and the official mind
- 5 Traditional resistance movements and Afro-Asian nationalism: the context of the 1857 Mutiny Rebellion
- 6 Nawab Walidad Khan and the 1857 Struggle in the Bulandshahr district
- 7 Rural revolt in the Great Rebellion of 1857 in India: a study of the Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar districts
- 8 Traditional elites in the Great Rebellion of 1857: some aspects of rural revolt in the upper and central Doab
- 9 The structure of landholding in Uttar Pradesh 1860–1948
- 10 Dynamism and enervation in North Indian agriculture: the historical dimension
- 11 Peasants, moneylenders and colonial rule: an excursion into Central India
- 12 The return of the peasant to South Asian history
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
Two distinct, though not necessarily opposing, interpretations dominate historical writing on nationalism in the Third World: the elder which is the elitist, and the newer which, for convenience, may be designated the populist. Whatever its emotive origins in the writings of the Fanon school, the newer interpretation has been pioneered for modern historical scholarship by work on those regions, notably East and Central Africa and the Congo, where the roots of the modern-educated elite and modern-style politics are shallowest. Here the telescoped nature of political development has made it credible to argue a historical connection between modern political activities and traditional resistance movements and even to assert the existence of a permanent, underlying ‘ur-nationalism’ which manifested its hostility to the European presence in a distinct series of historical forms. These forms were at first regarded as superseding one another in temporal succession as self-contained historical stages: firstly ‘primary resistance’, the hostile reaction of the unmodified tribal forms; then ‘secondary resistance’, the muter protest of millenarian movements, welfare associations, independent churches, and trade unions; and finally the emergence of modern political parties. On the old view only for this last stage could nationalism be regarded as a valid descriptive term.
The most recent school of East African historians has come, however, to see the process more as a logical progression than as one of strict temporal sequence, each stage or ‘moment’ representing an enlargement of scale in the expression of African political consciousness. The stages can, therefore, overlap, or, indeed, run in parallel.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Peasant and the RajStudies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India, pp. 120 - 139Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1978
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