376 Resisting Publics
possible for students to work diligently against the authorities in broad
daylight, as long as they did not get caught assisting actual physical revolt;
to call for revolt was not illegal in Europe as it was in the colonies. Thus,
the public sphere cultivated in Europe and protected by its own society’s
shared assumptions was a direct threat to the political, economic, and cul-
tural dominance of that society globally.^53
e can also see how important Europe was for the development W
of Benedict Anderson’s imagined community, an important part of mod-
ern understandings of nationalism. Although the vehicle for this com-
munity is not Anderson’s print capitalism, it nonetheless can be called a
print community. Indeed, these papers were an important part of the cre-
ation and presentation of a community of shared ideals and goals across
time and space; British intelligence records confirm that they were widely
disseminated in the colonies despite strong efforts to stop them. The fact
that nationalists from other colonies, including not just India but Ireland
and Russia, shared in the production and consumption of the Egyptian
nationalist papers is significant in demonstrating a shared community and
an anticipated new world order, no doubt very similar to that described in
President Wilson’s ill-fated Fourteen Points after the Great War. That the
ideal was not realized does not negate the clear evidence of its existence,
and the power it had to move these men.
sychologically, these raw and idealistic young men were far from P
their usual support systems and relied closely on one another as an alien
and often despised minority, creating a sense of solidarity and mission
that was sustained at least partially by the liberal and humanistic prin-
ciples lauded among the educated of Europe. These young men had to be
quite aware that these principles were not put into practice in their home
countries. But in addition to lessons on the unevenly realized visions of
European humanistic liberalism, they were exposed to the natives of other
colonies who were experiencing the same revelations. In European uni-
versities, these colonials from across the empires discovered something in
common with one another that led to an international and historical con-
sciousness, one that helped give their respective nationalist movements
both more breadth and more depth than could be fashioned by calls to
narrower local causes infused with quotes from Voltaire and Rousseau.
In fact, it is possible that the Socialists failed in many of their recruitment