The History of Ceylon under British Rule

Ceylon was the British colony in which the British were most willing to let go. The country received one of the most progressive constitutional arrangements in the British Empire, the Donoughmore Constitution of 1931, which extended universal adult suffrage to a population of some 4.5 million Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims. Ceylon also produced the most rapid decolonisation of any British Asian colony: the Soulbury Constitution of 1946 was the basis for independence on 4 February 1948, less than two years after the end of the Second World War. The British, in short, were prepared to lose Ceylon; what they could not do was anticipate the post-independence politics that would tear the country apart. The civil war of 1983–2009, in which perhaps 80,000 people died, was the long shadow of the colonial period; and the British had helped to make it.

The British Capture of Ceylon

Ceylon was captured by the British in 1796 during the Napoleonic Wars, when the British seized the Dutch colony. The British East India Company had been interested in Ceylon since the seventeenth century, and the capture of the island was part of a wider British strategy to secure the route to India. The British administration, which took over from the Dutch in 1796, was established under the terms of the 1802 Treaty of Amiens, which formally ceded the island to the British Crown.

The British retained the Dutch system of administration, including the Dutch legal codes and the Dutch administrative districts, and the change of colonial power was, in its early years, less dramatic than the British takeover of other Asian territories. The Burghers — the Dutch and Portuguese-descended Christians of the coast — retained a privileged place in the colonial administration for the first half of the nineteenth century. The Sinhalese and Tamil majority was, in the main, governed through the existing elites.

The Crown Colony of Ceylon

Ceylon was established as a Crown colony in 1802, with the governor responsible to the British Crown. The early administration of Ceylon was modelled on the British Indian administration, and the British administrators relied heavily on the existing Sinhalese and Tamil elites. The Colebrooke-Cameron reforms of 1833, which combined the separate administrations of the Kandyan and Maritime provinces and established a single legislative council, were a major step toward the unification of the island.

The Colebrooke-Cameron reforms also introduced a system of revenue and judicial administration, and they laid the foundations of the modern Ceylonese state. As the historian K. M. de Silva has shown in his History of Sri Lanka (1981), the reforms of 1833 were, by the standards of the time, a serious attempt to produce a modern colonial state. The 19th-century governors of Ceylon, including Sir Edward Barnes and Sir Henry Ward, played important roles in the modernisation of the island.

The Plantation Economy

The British administration of Ceylon was characterised by the development of plantation agriculture, particularly coffee, tea, rubber, and coconut. The coffee industry of Ceylon, developed in the 1830s and 1840s, was the first major plantation crop, and it was the foundation of the colonial economy. The coffee industry was destroyed by a fungal disease (Hemileia vastatrix) in the 1870s, but the tea industry of Ceylon, developed by planters such as James Taylor at the Loolecondera estate, replaced it. The rubber industry of Ceylon was a parallel development.

The plantation economy transformed the demographic composition of the island, and the migration of large numbers of Tamil workers from South India to the Ceylonese plantations had long-term political consequences. The Indian Tamil community, as the historian S. Arasaratnam showed, “came as labour, but they stayed as a political problem.”

The Tamil Migration

The development of the plantation economy led to the migration of large numbers of Tamil workers from South India to Ceylon, transforming the demographic composition of the island. The Indian Tamil community in Ceylon was concentrated in the central highlands, where they worked on the tea plantations, and they formed a distinct community with its own language, religion, and political traditions.

The Tamil political movement, which developed in the early twentieth century, demanded the protection of Tamil rights, and the question of the Indian Tamils became a major political issue in the years leading up to independence. The post-independence Tamil question, which was a central cause of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009), had its origins in the British plantation economy. The Citizenship Act of 1948, passed by the D. S. Senanayake government, denied citizenship to most Indian Tamils — a move that, in the judgment of the historian S. J. Tambiah, “settled the labour question at the cost of the Tamils.”

The Donoughmore Constitution

The Donoughmore Constitution of 1931 was a major step toward self-government, establishing a unicameral State Council with universal adult suffrage. The constitution was the work of the Donoughmore Commission, which had been appointed in 1927 to examine the political situation in Ceylon. The Donoughmore Constitution was one of the most progressive in the British Empire, and it provided for the election of a majority of the members of the State Council by universal adult suffrage. The State Council of Ceylon, which operated from 1931 to 1947, governed the country under a system of executive committees, and it provided the political training for the first generation of Ceylonese politicians.

The State Council, as the historian S. W. R. de A. Samarasinghe argued, was “the first time in the history of South Asia that universal adult suffrage was applied to a substantial population.” The Ceylonese experiment, which was two decades ahead of the rest of the British Empire in giving the vote to the entire adult population, produced a rapid politicisation that the British had not entirely anticipated.

The Soulbury Constitution

The Soulbury Constitution of 1946 was the final constitutional arrangement under British rule, providing for full self-government with dominion status. The constitution was the work of the Soulbury Commission, which had been appointed in 1944 to examine the question of constitutional reform. The negotiations leading to the Soulbury Constitution were led by D. S. Senanayake and the United National Party, which had been founded in 1946 as a coalition of Sinhalese political organisations. The role of the British in the transition was, in the end, relatively limited, and the Soulbury Constitution was the basis for the independence of Ceylon on 4 February 1948.

The Independence of Ceylon

Ceylon became independent on 4 February 1948, with D. S. Senanayake as the first prime minister. The independence ceremony, attended by the Duke of Gloucester, marked the peaceful transfer of power. The post-independence political trajectory of Ceylon was marked by the increasing dominance of the Sinhalese political majority, the marginalisation of the Tamil community, and the long-running civil war. The 1972 transformation of Ceylon into the Republic of Sri Lanka, the 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom, and the 2009 defeat of the Tamil Tigers are important parts of the post-independence story. The British period remains contested in modern Sri Lanka, and the legacy of the plantation economy and the constitutional traditions continues to influence the country.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of British Ceylon was, for a long time, dominated by the work of the Sinhalese historians — G. C. Mendis, S. G. Perera, and K. M. de Silva — who treated the colonial period as the foundation of the modern state. The Tamil and feminist revisions of the last thirty years, led by the work of S. J. Tambiah, S. Arasaratnam, and Mythri Jegathesan, have produced a more complex picture, in which the colonial period is read as the foundation of the post-independence conflicts. The current debate, exemplified in the work of Pradeep Jeganathan, is over how far the civil war of 1983–2009 can be attributed to the colonial period and how far it should be treated as a product of the post-independence period.

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