Britain transplanted its nation through colonization rather than building a multi-peopled empire

Evidence

In almost every case, official nationalism concealed a discrepancy between nation and dynastic realm. Hence a world-wide contradiction: Slovaks were to be Magyarized, Indians Anglicized, and Koreans Japanified, but they would not be permitted to join pilgrimages which would allow them to administer Magyars, Englishmen, or Japanese. The banquet to which they were invited always turned out to be a Barmecide feast. The reason for all this was not simply racism; it was also the fact that at the core of the empires nations too were emerging – Hungarian, English, and Japanese. And these nations were also instinctively resistant to ‘foreign’ rule. Imperialist ideology in the post-1850 era thus typically had the character of a conjuring-trick. How much it was a conjuring-trick is suggested by the equanimity with which metropolitan popular classes eventually shrugged off the ‘losses’ of the colonies, even in cases like Algeria where the colony had been legally incorporated into the metropole. In the end, it is always the ruling classes, bourgeois certainly, but above all aristocratic, that long mourn the empires, and their grief always has a stagey quality to it. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 401 (#expands, via linked claim)

But the important thing is that we see a long-range (30 years!) policy, consciously formulated and pursued, to turn ‘idolaters,’ not so much into Christians, as into people culturally English, despite their irremediable colour and blood. A sort of mental miscegenation is intended — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 363 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Britain deliberately pursued cultural conversion while excluding colonial subjects by race — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 363; Colonial exclusion sustained empire by dividing colonizers against themselves — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 228; England’s imperial geography forced race into its nationalism as a linking device (+3 more)

Related

• Britain deliberately pursued cultural conversion while excluding colonial subjects by race (similarity 0.83)
• Official nationalism invited colonized peoples to assimilate but barred full inclusion (similarity 0.82)
• Racial ideology entered English statecraft through governing India, not the colonies (similarity 0.82)
• Assimilationist colonial policies generate nationalist independence movements (similarity 0.81)
• Anglicized colonial elites were barred from the English nation itself (similarity 0.81)
• British colonization transplanted a national structure rather than expanding an imperial one. (similarity 0.81)
• Weak state peoples could not assimilate self-confident minorities (similarity 0.80)
• Rising national consciousness forced the state to recognize only nationals as citizens (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial nationalists copied and adapted European national models (similarity 0.80)
• England’s imperial geography forced race into its nationalism as a linking device (similarity 0.79)
• Open access to the imperial center preempted colonial nationalist movements (similarity 0.79)
• Metropolitan nations resisted ‘foreign’ colonial rule just as colonies did (similarity 0.78)
• Abolition without a universal rights frame seeded England’s racial doctrines (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Official nationalism invited colonized peoples to assimilate but barred full inclusion #expands (0.87) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 401
• Britain deliberately pursued cultural conversion while excluding colonial subjects by race #expands (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 363
• England’s imperial geography forced race into its nationalism as a linking device #expands (0.80)
• Colonized nationalists engaged with, rather than ignored, imposed imperial racial categories #qualifies (0.75)
• Colonial exclusion sustained empire by dividing colonizers against themselves #complicates (0.72) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 228