Empire size forced recruitment of bilingual native clerks who later became nationalists

Evidence

Second, imperial ‘Russification’ had its practical as well as ideological side. The sheer size of the global European empires, and the vast populations subjected, meant that purely metropolitan, or even creole, bureaucracies were neither recruitable nor affordable. The colonial state, and, somewhat later, corporate capital, needed armies of clerks, who to be useful had to be bilingual, capable of mediating linguistically between the metropolitan nation and the colonized peoples. The need was all the greater as the specialized functions of the state everywhere multiplied after the turn of the century. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 450

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Anglicized Indian elites faced permanent subordination despite assimilation — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 367; Empire-created bilingual elites became the vanguard of colonial nationalism; Bilingualism gave colonial intelligentsias access to modular models of nationalism — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 452 (+2 more)

Related

• Empire-created bilingual elites became the vanguard of colonial nationalism (similarity 0.84)
• Bilingualism gave colonial intelligentsias access to modular models of nationalism (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial nationalists copied and adapted European national models (similarity 0.81)
• Open access to the imperial center preempted colonial nationalist movements (similarity 0.80)
• Assimilationist colonial policies generate nationalist independence movements (similarity 0.79)
• An empire’s number of colonies shaped whether it trained administrators in native languages. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Empire-created bilingual elites became the vanguard of colonial nationalism #corroborates (1.00)
• Colonial rule’s native strata produced a renegade nationalist intelligentsia #corroborates (0.95)
• Bilingualism gave colonial intelligentsias access to modular models of nationalism #expands (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 452