Resisting empire, and reading both sides

Not every empire-building attempt succeeded. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1896, hoping to add it to its small African empire, Emperor Menelik II's forces decisively defeated the Italian army at the Battle of Adwa -- one of the only times an African state successfully resisted European conquest outright during this era, preserving Ethiopian independence and becoming a lasting source of pride across Africa and its global diaspora. In China, long-simmering resentment over foreign privilege and Christian missionary activity exploded into the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), an uprising by a movement foreigners nicknamed "Boxers" that besieged foreign diplomatic compounds in Beijing. An international coalition of eight nations crushed the rebellion and forced China to pay a massive indemnity under the Boxer Protocol of 1901 -- a humiliation that further discredited the weakened Qing Dynasty and helped fuel the nationalist and revolutionary movements that would topple it within a decade.

Resistance did not always mean armed uprising. In India, the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, began as a moderate organization of educated Indians petitioning for a greater voice in their own governance -- a small, patient seed that would grow into the mass independence movement you will study later this course. Taken together, Adwa, the Boxer Rebellion, and the Indian National Congress show that imperialism provoked real, often creative resistance almost everywhere it appeared. A careful historian holds both truths at once: colonizers genuinely believed and argued that their rule brought order, technology, and progress, while colonized peoples experienced real exploitation, violence, and loss of self-rule -- and reading only one side's sources, ever, produces only half of the actual history.