During and after the Dutch Invasion of Australia, Oceanyka's city-states and statelets were forced to overcome technological barriers and modernise, spurred on by costly casualties incurred in the battlefield. But there was a significant side effect to the flow of knowledge coming from Europe: the Enlightenment. Oceanykan intellectuals were introduced to the ideas of nationalism, romanticism and imperialism, taking them in with great enthusiasm. The latter half of the 18th century in Oceanyka is characterised by the birth and growth of small nation-states whose identity was increasingly either civic, racial, religious or a mixture of all three. As the idea of popular sovereignty spread like wildfire, feudal kingdoms were toppled and in their place sprang up radical republics or populist kingdoms. This period of political instability is known by contemporary historians as the Oceanykan Awakening.
However, by the 1780s, a counter-revolution emerged in the south-east; the Imperialists as they called themselves were convinced that a militarised, centralised state encompassing the entire continent under a single authority was the only way to prevent the yoke of European colonialism from falling upon Oceanykan civilisation. Their greatest weapon was to be the mass mobilisation of citizens against all of their enemies. This not only meant invading forces, but also more abstract evils; by swaying the masses into action, the Imperialists hoped to eliminate hunger, crime, ignorance, and a host of other problems, thus it was an utopian movement. Ideals inspired not only by European philosophy, but also by Morlonic Asterism. Needless to say, not everyone agreed with these people. Kings, both feudal and absolute, abhorred everything that the Imperialists stood for. Most of Oceanyka's republican governments had strong disagreements with them, too. Regardless, the Imperialists' influence in courts and intellectual circles continued to grow as a sort of Oceanykan proto-nationalism.
On 1785, the situation turned dire as a group of army officers toppled the Kingdom of Yrvan, massacred most of the nobility, and proclaimed the Greater Cestlep Revolutionary State. The new leaders of this region revealed themselves as members of the Imperialists. Over the next three years, they embarked in a process of total revolution in all affairs of the State; the Army's officers were trained almost exclusively by European veterans, census and conscription systems were set up, mobilised manpower was used for public works, propaganda officers were built, and most of the economy was focused on preparing for a war of unheard of proportions. Small scale conflicts between this entity and its neighbours, in which it quadrupled its land area, set off alarms throughout the continent.
In terms of culture, economy and warfare, Oceanyka's independent states sought to emulate Europe during this time period, even allowing a number of families from said continent to settle in their lands. The Dutch invasion had demonstrated that Oceanykan society required a profound modernisation, and progress became the new objective of all rulers, swayed by the Enlightenment. Civil liberties unheard of before, such as freedom of worship, became less uncommon. However, as the art of warfare was perfectioned, quantity became the defining factor in armed conflict. At first it was the second son of every family, then one every two men, and finally universal conscription began to be legislated around Oceanyka.
After the British First Fleet founded the city of Sydney in Oceanyka's eastern coast, a number of Europeans settled in the continent's less populated regions, leading to yet another enormous increase in trade and cultural exchange between both continents. Therefore, this period is known as the Late Revolutionary Age.