Colonial whites misread multi-ethnic solidarity that would someday outnumber them.

Evidence

The significance of these events should have been clear, but the whites were deceived by their discourse of domination. That error was of strategic proportions in a society that by the opening decades of the next century was 4 percent white, 15 percent mulatto, 1 percent Chinese, and 80 percent of African and East Indian origins and descent. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1149