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Who colonized Sri Lanka?

South Asia — the powers that ruled Sri Lanka, the dates, and what independence did and did not change.

In short

Who colonized Sri Lanka?

Portugal, the Netherlands and Britain in sequence. Portugal from 1505, the Dutch from 1658, and Britain from 1796 — the first to control the whole island after taking Kandy in 1815 — until independence on 4 February 1948.

Sri Lanka was colonised three times over, each power taking the coast before the last one moved inland; the Kandyan kingdom held out until 1815.

Reference

Who ruled Sri Lanka, and when

before 1505
Kotte, Jaffna and Kandy kingdoms
1505–1658
Portugal — coastal areas
1658–1796
Dutch East India Company
1796–1948
Britain — Ceylon

At a glance

Key facts

Colonising powers
Portugal, Netherlands, Britain
Independence
4 February 1948
Three colonisers
Portuguese, Dutch and British in unbroken succession, 443 years
Plantation labour
Around a million Indian Tamil workers brought in under indenture-like terms
Citizenship
Many plantation Tamils were left stateless by the 1948 Citizenship Act

Chronology

Key dates

  1. 1505

    Portuguese arrival; coastal control follows.

  2. 1658

    The VOC displaces Portugal.

  3. 1796

    Britain takes the Dutch possessions.

  4. 1815

    Kandy falls; the whole island under one ruler for the first time in centuries.

  5. 1830s–1900s

    Coffee then tea plantations; Tamil labour brought from India.

  6. 1948

    Independence.

Context

What the record shows

The tea economy that defines the island's exports was built on imported South Indian labour whose descendants were denied citizenship at independence — a colonial arrangement whose consequences outlasted the empire.

Questions

Frequently asked

Who colonised Sri Lanka?
Portugal from 1505, the Netherlands from 1658 and Britain from 1796 until independence in 1948.
What was Ceylon?
The colonial name for Sri Lanka, used by the Portuguese, Dutch and British and retained until 1972.
When did Sri Lanka become independent?
4 February 1948.

Read on

Related in the archive

References

Sources — colonial Sri Lanka

  1. [1]Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Seville, 1552).
  2. [2]Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
  3. [3]Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (Monthly Review Press, 1971; English 1973).
  4. [4]Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
  5. [5]Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (Random House, 1991).
  6. [6]Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (Hurst, 2017).
  7. [7]Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, 2005).
  8. [8]Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Wisconsin, 2009).
  9. [9]Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
  10. [10]Jürgen Zimmerer, "The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colonialism", Patterns of Prejudice 39:2 (2005), on the German South-West Africa → Holocaust lineage.
  11. [11]Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1972).
  12. [12]Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), Chapter 31 ("Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist").

All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.