AMSCO 6.3 Indigenous Responses to State Expansion Notes

Overview

AMSCO Topic 6.3, Indigenous Responses to State Expansion (p. 388-397), covers how peoples across the Americas, Africa, Asia, the Balkans, and Oceania pushed back against imperial expansion between 1750 and 1900. The big pattern: resistance took three main forms, which the AP exam loves to test. People fought back directly within empires (Túpac Amaru II, the 1857 rebellion in India), built new states on imperial peripheries (the Sokoto Caliphate, Balkan nations, the Zulu Kingdom), and launched rebellions fueled by religious ideas (the Ghost Dance, the Xhosa Cattle Killing, the Mahdist Revolt). Ironically, many resistance leaders used the European-style educations imperialism gave them, along with Enlightenment ideas like natural rights, sovereignty, and nationalism, against their colonizers.

This topic is the "response" half of the imperialism story. Read it alongside AMSCO 6.2 State Expansion notes, which covers the expansion these movements were responding to.

Nationalist Movements in the Balkans

By the early 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was losing its grip on the Balkan Peninsula, and ethnic nationalism (inspired by the French Revolution) drove Balkan peoples to seek independence.

• Serbia won independence in 1815 and Greece in 1832, both after long wars.
• Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Bulgaria all rebelled against Ottoman rule. Serbia and Russia joined in during the last major Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878).
• The Treaty of Berlin (1878) freed Bulgaria, Romania, and Montenegro but handed Bosnia and Herzegovina to Austria-Hungary.
• Why it matters long-term: the ethnic tensions here set the stage for World War I.

This is the textbook example of "new states created on the peripheries" of a weakening empire.

Resistance and Rebellion in the Americas

In the Americas, indigenous responses ranged from assimilation to armed revolt to spiritual movements, and almost all of them ran into expansionist settler states.

North America: Proclamation, Cherokee, and the Ghost Dance

• The Proclamation of 1763, issued by Britain after the French and Indian War, reserved land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi for Native Americans. It was the first time a European government recognized indigenous territorial rights, and British colonists hated it. After U.S. independence, settlers overran the Ohio and Illinois river valleys anyway.
• The Cherokee Nation tried assimilation after 1800. They adopted settler-style farming, weaving, and building, created a syllabic alphabet (making nearly the whole tribe literate), published the Cherokee Phoenix (the first Native American newspaper in the U.S.), and wrote a constitution modeled on the U.S. Constitution. None of it protected them. After gold was discovered on Cherokee land in Georgia in 1829, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, forcing the Cherokee and other Southeast tribes to relocate to present-day Oklahoma.
• The Ghost Dance began around 1869 with Northern Paiute prophet-dreamers who taught that the dead would return and drive out the whites, restoring Native lands and traditions. The ritual dances and songs spread across the West, reaching the Sioux by 1890. The movement fell at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, which marked the end of the Indian Wars.

Túpac Amaru II's Rebellion in Peru

José Gabriel Condorcanqui was a cacique (hereditary chief) in southern Peru, descended from the last Inca ruler. He took the name Túpac Amaru II and kept his Inca identity despite a formal Jesuit education. In 1780 he arrested and executed a colonial administrator for cruelty, sparking the last general Indian revolt against Spain. The revolt spread through southern Peru into Bolivia and Argentina, and some criollos initially supported it. Captured in March 1781, he was forced to watch his wife and sons executed in Cuzco before being tortured and executed himself. This is the classic "direct resistance" example for this topic.

French Intervention in Mexico

In 1863, Mexican conservatives conspired with Napoleon III of France to overthrow the liberal government of Benito Juárez, a full-blooded Zapotec. Napoleon III installed Archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico (crowned June 10, 1864). After three more years of war, Mexicans forced the French out. Maximilian was executed on June 19, 1867, and Juárez resumed the presidency. Resistance here worked.

South Asian Movements: The 1857 Rebellion and the Raj

The Indian Rebellion of 1857 (also called the Sepoy Mutiny) began over rifle cartridges greased with cow and pig fat. Sepoys were Indian soldiers in British employ, mostly Hindus and Muslims, and the cartridges offended both groups, who became convinced the British wanted to convert them to Christianity. The uprising spread through northern Indian cities before the British put it down, killing thousands.

The consequences reshaped India:

• Britain exiled the Mughal emperor and ended the Mughal Empire.
• The British Raj replaced Company rule: from 1858 until independence in 1947, the colonial government took orders directly from London.
• The rebellion marked the emergence of Indian nationalism. In 1885, British-educated Indians founded the Indian National Congress, which started as a forum for grievances but quickly called for self-rule. Because Hindus dominated its first meeting, many Indian Muslims were suspicious of it.

Southeast Asian Resistance: Vietnam and the Philippines

By the 1880s, Siam (Thailand) was the only independent country left in Southeast Asia.

• Vietnam: When 12-year-old Ham Nghi became emperor in 1884, his top advisers were vocal critics of the French. The French raided the royal palace, but the emperor had been hidden. His supporters resisted until his capture and exile to Algeria in 1888, and Phan Dinh Phung carried the resistance to 1895, becoming a hero to later Vietnamese revolutionaries.
• Philippines: José Rizal, educated in Europe, founded the Liga Filipina in 1892. The Liga was actually loyal to Spain, but the Spanish executed Rizal anyway, shocking Filipinos and feeding nationalist ambitions. Revolts around Manila in 1896 launched the Philippine Revolution.
• After the U.S. won the Battle of Manila Bay in the Spanish-American War (1898), Filipino rebels expected independence. Instead, the Treaty of Paris transferred the Philippines from Spain to the United States, triggering the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). About 20,000 Filipino troops and over 200,000 civilians died; of 4,300 American deaths, nearly two-thirds were from disease. The Philippines stayed a U.S. possession until 1946.

The Philippine case is great essay evidence: a colony swapped one imperial ruler for another, and nationalism didn't disappear, it intensified.

Resistance in Australia and New Zealand

• Australia: Aboriginal people have lived in Australia for an estimated 50,000 years, the oldest continuous culture on Earth, with perhaps 1 million people in 500 clans speaking 700 languages at European settlement. When Britain began sending convicts and soldiers to New South Wales in 1788, the colonial government didn't recognize indigenous land ownership, and Aboriginal people weren't considered British subjects, so the law didn't protect them. Thousands were killed defending their territory and resources.
• New Zealand: The Maori arrived from Polynesia in the 14th century. The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi promised British protection of Maori property rights, but settlement patterns alarmed the Maori and the Maori Wars broke out. Britain prevailed by 1846, fighting flared again when troops were sent in 1861 to pressure land sales, and an uneasy peace came in 1872. By 1900 the Maori had lost most of their land.

African Resistance: Sokoto to Yaa Asantewaa

Organized African resistance developed later than Indian resistance because Europeans had been in India longer, and colonial governments in Africa were run largely by European military officials rather than partially by locals. By the end of World War I, Western-educated Africans had built a shared identity called Pan-Africanism.

• Sokoto Caliphate: In 1804, Usman dan Fodio led Muslim intellectuals in a drive to purify Islam among the Hausa, creating a caliphate centered at Sokoto. It became the largest African empire since the 16th century, and it grew its economy through the slave trade just as Britain was trying to end it (the British navy intercepted Sokoto ships and relocated freed people to Sierra Leone). Britain finally absorbed Sokoto into Nigeria in 1903.
• Xhosa Cattle Killing Movement (1856-1857): After Xhosa cattle began sickening and dying, possibly from settler cattle diseases, the Xhosa killed perhaps 400,000 cattle and destroyed crops, believing spirits would then remove the British. The result was famine and thousands of deaths, and the British stayed.
• Anglo-Zulu War (1870s): The well-organized, centralized Zulu Kingdom initially won against the British but was eventually defeated, and Zulu lands became part of British South Africa.
• Samory Touré: A Mande chieftain who built a powerful kingdom in Guinea starting in 1868, he fought French annexation of West Africa beginning in 1883 and again in 1891. The French captured and exiled him in 1898.
• Mahdist Revolt: In 1881, Sudanese cleric Muhammad Ahmad declared himself the Mahdi ("guided one") and turned long-standing resentment of Egyptian rule (sharpened by British arrival in 1873) into a religious army. The Mahdists took the area around Khartoum by 1882 and overran a British-Egyptian force in January 1885, but Ahmad's death that June fractured the movement. Britain returned in 1896 and defeated the Mahdists in September 1898.
• Yaa Asantewaa War (1900): Britain's fifth attempt to subjugate the Asante Empire (in present-day Ghana) began when the British governor demanded the Golden Stool, the Asante symbol of national unity. Warrior queen Yaa Asantewaa led the rebellion, the last African war led by a woman. About 2,000 Asante and 1,000 British died, more than in the first four wars combined. Britain won in September 1900, exiled Yaa Asantewaa, and absorbed Asante into the Gold Coast colony.

Key Terms to Know

Practice and Next Steps

For the College Board framing of this material, review the Topic 6.3 Indigenous Responses to Imperialism study guide, then continue to AMSCO 6.4 Global Economic Development notes. The full set of chapter summaries lives on the AMSCO notes page.

To check yourself, sort these movements into the three categories (direct resistance, new states, religious rebellions) from memory, then test the material with guided multiple-choice practice. These examples make strong evidence for comparison and causation essays, so try writing with them in FRQ practice with instant scoring.