Items25The creator’s order
  1. 1Dadabhai NaorojiDadabhai NaorojiBorn 4 Sept 1825Naoroji made the economic case first. His "drain theory", set out in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), calculated how pensions, salaries, interest and profits flowed from India to Britain each year, arguing that colonial rule impoverished the country it claimed to improve. Elected MP for…0i
  2. 2Jamal al-Din al-AfghaniJamal al-Din al-AfghaniAl-Afghani travelled from Kabul and Istanbul to Cairo, Paris and Tehran urging Muslims to unite against European domination, and argued that Islam was compatible with reason and science if freed from blind imitation of past scholars. His pan-Islamic answer to empire, a community of faith rather…0i
  3. 3José MartíJosé MartíBorn 28 Jan 1853Martí organised Cuba's war of independence from Spain from exile in New York and died in its first weeks in 1895. His essay "Our America" (1891) argued that Latin American republics failed when they copied European and US models and must govern from their own realities, including their Indigenous…0i
  4. 4Rabindranath TagoreRabindranath TagoreTagore opposed British rule and returned his knighthood after the 1919 Amritsar massacre, yet he distrusted the nationalism rising against it. His lectures Nationalism (1917) called the nation state a machine for organised selfishness that India should not imitate, and he argued publicly with…0i
  5. 5Sun Yat-senSun Yat-senBorn 12 Nov 1866China was never fully colonised, but Sun framed its revolution against the Qing dynasty and the foreign concessions as a struggle against semi-colonial domination. His Three Principles of the People, nationalism, democracy and "people's livelihood", mixed republicanism with land reform and…0i
  6. 6Mahatma GandhiMahatma GandhiBorn 2 Oct 1869Gandhi's Hind Swaraj (1909) is more radical than his popular image: it argues that India should reject not just British rulers but modern civilisation itself, railways, lawyers and machine industry included, in favour of self-governing villages and hand-spinning. His method of satyagraha, mass…0i
  7. 7Muhammad IqbalMuhammad IqbalBorn 9 Nov 1877The poet-philosopher Iqbal rejected both Western materialism and territorial nationalism, which he saw as dividing Muslims, and called in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam for a dynamic, self-renewing faith. Yet his 1930 presidential address to the Muslim League proposed a Muslim…0i
  8. 8Marcus GarveyMarcus GarveyGarvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association claimed millions of followers across the Americas and Africa in the early 1920s on a simple programme: "Africa for the Africans", Black-owned businesses such as the Black Star Line shipping company, and racial pride. His vision was of a powerful…0i
  9. 9Jawaharlal NehruJawaharlal NehruBorn 14 Nov 1889Nehru loved Gandhi and disagreed with him about the future. The Discovery of India (written in prison, 1944) imagined a secular, scientific nation drawing on a long plural history, and as prime minister he built it with five-year plans, steel mills, dams he called "temples of modern India" and…0i
  10. 10Ho Chi MinhHo Chi MinhBorn 19 May 1890As a young man in Paris, Ho petitioned the 1919 Versailles conference for Vietnamese rights and was ignored; he then concluded that Leninism, with its theses on national and colonial questions, offered colonised peoples the only serious ally. His 1945 declaration of independence opened by quoting…0i