"The metropolitan efforts to complete this British imperial hierarchy at the centre and to export it abroad, so as to forge 'an entire interactive system', were never a complete success [and] the American colonists eventually rejected the whole thing outright ... [The British imperial] hierarchical world-view that was extended across the British empire was conservative in its ideology, and stressed the importance of tradition and unchangingness .. the elaborate, layered social ordering of the American
colonies was, at the mid eighteenth century, a relatively recent development"
- David Cannadine, historian, Orndañentalism: How the
British Saw Their Empire, 2002

According to the passage, which of the following best
explains the most important effect that British imperial
stance had on colonists' ideological resistance?