P. V. J. Jayasekera's study takes up British rule in Sri Lanka and the responses it provoked — resistance, revivalism and reform — and argues that the standard historical account of that period needs rethinking from the ground up. His starting position is a criticism of his own discipline: that Sri Lankan historians have, on the whole, gone along with what he calls the legitimising ideology of colonialism, adopting the terms in which British administration explained and justified itself. Working from a wide range of sources, he sets out to challenge readings of the period that have been passed down largely unexamined.
The argument concentrates on how colonial policy was made and whose interests it served. Jayasekera describes an alliance of British officials, planters and entrepreneurs, and follows the measures that came out of it — among them the grain tax and the law governing land ownership. His case is that these instruments worked together to deepen the impoverishment of the peasantry and to produce growing landlessness in the countryside. Economic policy, in this reading, is not a backdrop to the political history of the island under British rule but the substance of it.
This is the first volume of the work, published in Colombo by Vijitha Yapa. It was reviewed in the Sri Lanka Journal of Social Sciences.
The book is written as a work of scholarship rather than a general introduction. Readers coming to it will find sustained argument, extensive use of primary material and a direct engagement with existing historical writing on the period. That makes it most useful to people who already have some footing in Sri Lankan history — university students, researchers, and general readers with a serious interest in the colonial period and in how its history has been written. Anyone who has read the standard accounts of British Ceylon will recognise what Jayasekera is arguing against.
Its subject matter also speaks to questions that remain live in Sri Lanka: land, revenue, rural poverty, and the long consequences of decisions taken by an administration answerable elsewhere. Jayasekera treats resistance, religious revival and reform movements not as separate episodes but as responses to the same set of pressures, which is part of what distinguishes his approach from the historiography he criticises.
A substantial volume for readers building a library on Sri Lankan colonial history, and for anyone interested in the historiographical debate about how that history should be told.
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