Abstract
Some attention has been paid in recent years to the sociological analysis of political élites in the “new nations” of Africa and Asia with a view to understanding better their political behavior. W. H. Morris-Jones and Myron Weiner have both considered the characteristics of some of the politicians in post-independence India. But little has been done on the leadership of minority groups.
In many cases (eg., the Armenians, Copts, and Maronites in the Middle East, the Parsis in India, and the Chinese in Southeast Asia), the members of religious and linguistic minorities adapted more rapidly to modern ways than the majorities among whom they lived. Although the former sometimes enjoyed privileged status as go betweens for the European colonial rulers, they were also among the first to absorb the Western concept of nationalism. They even provided some of the early leadership for nationalist movements, until the mobilization of broader and lower levels of the population around neo-traditional religious symbols began to exclude them from the national self-definition.
