Islanded – Britain, Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony

A groundbreaking retelling of the advent of British rule in Sri Lanka. How did the modern nation of Sri Lanka come to be? In search of an answer to this question, Islanded returns us to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and to the advance of the British on the kingdom of Kandy. This advance saw the fall of the last foothold of kingly rule, centered in the highlands of the island. The British undertook a process of “islanding” and “partitioning,” which cast the island, its nature and geography, its religious and ethnic character, and its historical traditions and maritime culture as separate from British domains in mainland India and elsewhere. Kings had seen themselves as rightful rulers of the whole territory of the island. Now, this right was violently extended by British colonists through the application of a model of crown rule and modern bureaucracy that tied ethnicity to language and religion, employing essentialized but not fully realized patterns that would continue to trouble the modern nation. Picking up a range of unusual themes, from migration, orientalism, and ethnography to botany, medicine, and education, Islanded is a groundbreaking text in Sri Lankan history writing, shaping discussions of the imperial transition in South Asia.