Dutch and British Colonial Intervention in Sri Lanka, 1780-1815


Book Description

This study of Dutch and British colonial intervention on Sri Lanka in the period 1780 - 1815 provides a new over-all characterisation of the functioning and growth of the colonial state in a period of transition.




Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History


Book Description

The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. They address these matters from their varied disciplinary perspectives and diverse array of sources, critically assessing concepts such as ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and localisation, and elucidating the subtle ways in which the foreign may be resisted and embraced at the same time. The individual chapters, and the volume as a whole, are a welcome addition to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka, as well as studies of the Indian Ocean region, kingship, colonialism, imperialism, and early modernity.




Islanded


Book Description

How did the British come to conquer South Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Answers to this question usually start in northern India, neglecting the dramatic events that marked Britain’s contemporaneous subjugation of the island of Sri Lanka. In Islanded, Sujit Sivasundaram reconsiders the arrival of British rule in South Asia as a dynamic and unfinished process of territorialization and state building, revealing that the British colonial project was framed by the island’s traditions and maritime placement and built in part on the model they provided. Using palm-leaf manuscripts from Sri Lanka to read the official colonial archive, Sivasundaram tells the story of two sets of islanders in combat and collaboration. He explores how the British organized the process of “islanding”: they aimed to create a separable unit of colonial governance and trade in keeping with conceptions of ethnology, culture, and geography. But rather than serving as a radical rupture, he reveals, islanding recycled traditions the British learned from Kandy, a kingdom in the Sri Lankan highlands whose customs—from strategies of war to views of nature—fascinated the British. Picking up a range of unusual themes, from migration, orientalism, and ethnography to botany, medicine, and education, Islanded is an engaging retelling of the advent of British rule.




Dynastic Colonialism


Book Description

Dynastic Colonialism analyses how women and men employed objects in particular places across the world during the early modern period in order to achieve the remarkable expansion of the House of Orange-Nassau. Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent explore how the House emerged as a leading force during a period in which the Dutch accrued one of the greatest seaborne empires. Using the concept of dynastic colonialism, they explore strategic behaviours undertaken on behalf of the House of Orange-Nassau, through material culture in a variety of sites of interpretation from palaces and gardens to prints and teapots, in Europe and beyond. Using over 140 carefully selected images, the authors consider a wide range of visual, material and textual sources including portraits, glassware, tiles, letters, architecture and global spaces in order to rethink dynastic power and identity in gendered terms. Through the House of Orange-Nassau, Broomhall and Van Gent demonstrate how dynasties could assert status and power by enacting a range of colonising strategies. Dynastic Colonialism offers an exciting new interpretation of the complex story of the House of Orange-Nassau‘s rise to power in the early modern period through material means that will make fascinating reading for students and scholars of early modern European history, material culture, and gender. This book is highly illustrated throughout. The print edition features the images in black and white, whereas the eBook edition contains the illustrations in colour.




Historical Dictionary of the Netherlands


Book Description

The Kingdom of the Netherlands is a small, but heavily populated country with almost 17 million inhabitants. It is one of the last kingdoms in Europe and in 2015 it celebrated its 200 years anniversary. The Netherlands became a kingdom after the Napoleonic era. During this period it was transformed into a centralized state. Before those years it had been one of few republics in Europe for about two centuries. That state was a confederacy, which emerged in the 1580s during its independence struggle against the Spanish Habsburgs. Although the present state is still monarchial, the Netherlands functions as a modern constitutional democracy, in which the king’s position is almost comparable with a ceremonial presidency. The majority of the Dutch population, however, appreciates the hereditary political presence of the House of Orange-Nassau, regarding this dynasty as a symbol of national unity and connection with the country’s past. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of the Netherlands contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 900 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Netherlands.




War, Denial and Nation-Building in Sri Lanka


Book Description

This book begins from a critical account of the final months of the Sri Lankan civil war, tracing themes of nationalism, discourse and conflict memory through this period of immense violence and into its aftermath. Using these themes to explore state crime, atrocity and its denial and representation, Seoighe offers an analysis of how stories of conflict are authored and constructed. This book examines the political discourse of the former Rajapaksa government, highlighting how fluency in international discourses of counter-terrorism, humanitarianism and the ‘reconciliation’ expected of states transitioning from conflict can be used to conceal and deny state violence. Drawing on extensive interviews with activists, academics, politicians, state representatives and international agency staff, and three months of observation in Sri Lanka in 2012, Seoighe demonstrates how the Rajapaksa government re-narrativised violence through orchestrated techniques of denial and mass ritual discourse. It drew on and perpetuated a heightened majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism which consolidated power under Sinhalese political elites, generated minority grievances and, in turn, sustained the repression and dispossession of the Tamil community of the Northeast. A detailed and evocative study, this book will be of special interest to scholars of conflict studies, political violence and critical criminology.




Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future


Book Description

For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British East India Company consolidated its rule over India, evolving from a trading venture to a colonial administrative force. Yet its territorial gains far outpaced its understanding of the region and the people who lived there, and its desperate efforts to gain knowledge of the area led to the 1815 appointment of army officer Colin Mackenzie as the first Surveyor General of India. This volume carefully reconstructs the life and career of Mackenzie, showing how the massive survey of India that he undertook became one of the most spectacular and wide-ranging knowledge production initiatives in British colonial history.




Global Calvinism


Book Description

A comprehensive study of the connection between Calvinist missions and Dutch imperial expansion during the early modern period "A tour de force offering the reader the best study of global Calvinism in the realms of the Dutch East India Company."--Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, editor, Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age Calvinism went global in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as close to a thousand Dutch Reformed ministers, along with hundreds of lay chaplains, attached themselves to the Dutch East India and West India companies. Across Asia, Africa, and the Americas where the trading companies set up operation, Dutch ministers sought to convert "pagans," "Moors," Jews, and Catholics and to spread the cultural influence of Protestant Christianity. As Dutch ministers labored under the auspices of the trading companies, the missionary project coalesced, sometimes grudgingly but often readily, with empire building and mercantile capitalism. Simultaneously, Calvinism became entangled with societies around the world as encounters with Indigenous peoples shaped the development of European religious and intellectual history. Though historians have traditionally treated the Protestant and European expansion as unrelated developments, Charles H. Parker the explores the global reach of Dutch Calvinism as an intermingling of a Protestant faith, commerce, and empire.




The Dutch Overseas Empire, 1600–1800


Book Description

How did the Dutch Empire compare with other imperial enterprises? And how was it experienced by the indigenous peoples who became part of this colonial power? At the start of the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic emerged as the centre of a global empire that stretched along the edges of continents and connected societies surrounding the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the Dutch Empire, ideas of religious tolerance and scientific curiosity went hand in hand with severe political and economic exploitation of the local populations through violence, monopoly and slavery. This pioneering history of the early modern Dutch Empire, over two centuries, for the first time provides a comparative and indigenous perspective on Dutch overseas expansion. Apart from discussing the impact of the Empire on the economy and society at home in the Dutch Republic, it also offers a fascinating window into the contemporary societies of Asia, Africa and the Americas and, through their interactions, on processes of early modern globalisation.




Sugar and the Indian Ocean World


Book Description

Tracing the history of the sugar trade and its consumption in the Persian Gulf during the 18th century, this book explores the interplay of social, economic and political interests created by this popular commodity. The study of sugar has, until now, focused mainly on its significant growth in European markets from the mid-17th century and, more recently, parallel developments in East Asia. In this book, Daito shows how the sugar trade also developed in, and became important to, the Indian Ocean World. Studying how the consumption of sugar wavered after the brutal overthrow of the Safavid dynasty in 1722, this book shows how the Dutch East India Company and the trading network responded to political upheavals in the region and, consequently, the changing trading conditions. Arguing that sugar continued to be imported and consumed despite these political disturbances, Sugar and the Indian Ocean World proves this was not a period of economic stagnation for the region, and shows how sugar became an important intersection between socio-cultural practices and the Indian Ocean economy.