Indian nationalism seems the most impressive of the movements which have led to the emancipation of Asia and Africa from colonial control. The long struggle inside this vast country, together with the stature of the men who led it, encouraged the progress of similar movements elsewhere; while the dramatic events of 1947 had much to do with the dismantling of imperialism in the old sense of the term. Yet whatever its importance in inspiring other seekers after the Political Kingdom, the history of the Indian movement has too many special features to be characteristic of these nationalisms as a whole. Consequently it is best to begin a definition by stating what the movement was not. The political arithmetic of India during the 1870s and 1880s, when the movement was taking shape, shows that it was not formed through the promptings of any class demand or as the consequence of any sharp changes in the structure of the economy. India had been little developed, and efforts at development had brought about a new unevenness in the social and economic structure of the country. There were keen internal rivalries, but these were between caste and caste, community and community, not between class and class. Moreover, those groups which felt a similarity of interest were themselves more the product of bureaucratic initiative than of economic change. Since these groups can be largely identified with the men educated in western styles, and since it was these men whose hopes and fears went into the building of the new associations that emerged as the Indian National Congress, a conceptual system based on elites, rather than on classes, would seem more promising.