The model for anti-imperial nationalism was the Philippines, where
three centuries of Spanish rule and shared religion made the imperial
unit appear persuasive as early as the 1860s. By the time of Jos6 Rizal
and his fellow-ilustrados in the 1890s, the case they made in Spanish for a
Filipino national unit as a focus for passionate loyalty was sufficiently
convincing to dominate the anti-Spanish revolution of 1896 and the war
of resistance against American occupation that followed. At more populist
levels, there were naturally tremors of ethnie nationalism carried by
Tagalog and Cebuano, but these never seriously shook the conviction