Top Highlights

• Moreover, when faced with red revolution, even the rather democratic radicals tended to retreat into rhetoric, torn between their genuine sympathy for ‘the people’ and their sense of property and money.
• Certain kinds of free international movement which are today controlled, notably those of capital and labour, i.e. migration, were by 1848 taken so much for granted in the developed world that they were hardly even discussed
• And yet another form of mass nationalism had long existed: both more traditional, more revolutionary and more independent of local middle classes, if only because these were of no great economic and political consequence. But can we call the rebellions of peasants and mountaineers against foreign rule ‘nationalist’, when united only by the consciou...
• The colonies of solid indigenous population raised more serious problems, because the scarcity of whites made it essential to use natives on a large scale to administer and overawe them on behalf of their rulers, and these had in any case to administer through the already existing local institutions, at least at the local level. In other words, the...
• The large areas of India not yet taken under direct administration were left to the rule of puppet indigenous princes, controlled by the British yet officially flattered and respected, and these in turn became the pillars of the regime which guaranteed them wealth, local power and status.