"The British, who had a policy of transforming the border regions into a protective cordon of the empire, 'discovered' the Nagas in about 1830 but prohibited the entry in this area to anyone without official or military capacity, which curiously did not exclude the Christian missionaries! .... One might say that it was the administrators, and in their wake the ethnographers and missionaries who, by a need of rational classification and order, invented the Naga tribes and consequently Naga nationalism. .... In a concern to protect the tea plantations of Assam (from, among other things, the Naga incursions), the British pursued a long process of pacification, administration and christianization, deeper and deeper into the hill country. The Nagas vigorously resisted this expansion; the response to their rebellions consisted of punitive expeditions and the 'civilizing' missions..."