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

by Sujit Sivasundaram

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.

Genres: History

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Sujit Sivasundaram is a British Sri Lankan historian and academic. He is currently professor of world history at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge.

Reviews

[Dimantha (දිමන්ත) Polwatte (පොල්වත්ත) · Rating 3 out of 5]

ISLANDED - Britain, Sri Lanka, and the bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony : Sujit Sivasundaram - A historical perspective into the colonizer and colonized

https://bookerreadsdaily.blogspot.com...

I purchased 'Islanded' by SS from SLbooks.lk in 2024 August online.

But I didn't read the book until 2025 January, when I participated in an event at the Colombo Public Library under the Ceylon Literary and Arts Festival 2025 events series.

I made a short note on the participation in the event, and it is as follows.



Islanded and connected - Sujit Sivasundaram (SS), Shamara Wettamuni (SW), and in conversation with Judith Perera (JP)


The following topics were considered for discussion, which are numbered, and I have pinpointed the main subtopics discussed.


(01) Identity


SS

Gender, Nationalism

Slippery concept?

Collective identity - religious, cultural, monarchic, imperialistic,

Identity of the Sri Lankan kingship - Nayakkar ( not Sinhalese)


SW

Shifting identities

Religious revival mid 19th century

Henry Steel Olcott / Blavatsky - Buddhism


(02) Migration and globalization

SS

City of Colombo - one of the largest ports in the world
If you are going to Australia, you have to go through Sri Lanka after coming through the Suez Canal.

Egypt

The emergence of identity was in the 19th and early 20th centuries

Ideology

Structure of capitalism


(03) Marginalized communities


SW

Rewriting the life of slavery

Africans and Indian Tamils in the upcountry


SS

History never ends.

Waves across the South - 18th and 19th century Indian Ocean

gender structures

American and French Revolution

Australian Sri Lankan literature


(04) State of history education

SW

Not in a good state

One-dimensional Sinhala Buddhist nationalism


SS

UK

Brexit, many prime ministers

Culture wars

At Cambridge University, the syllabus is changed drastically

Archeologists collaboration

The value of history is a navigation of the present with cultural identity


(05) Questions from the audience

Mahawamsa bloodshed

SW

Criticisms of the Mahawamsa with an open mind

SS

Colonial orientalists make the Mahawamsa is a canonical text

Palm leaf literature


(06) Role of academic historian

Reality is a struggle in history


After that discussion, I was able to get the book signed by the author, as shown in the image shared above.

Prof. Sujit’s Islanded is a very contemporary work that analyzes historical texts related to Sri Lanka in a more modern way, deviating from nationalism and focusing on power dynamics, trade, orientalism, literature, and more. How we were molded in the 19th century is revealed in this book, opening the minds of Sri Lankans to many new paradigms. When you keep on reading, it is evident that the British took a more lenient colonialism towards Sri Lanka.

Who we are as Sri Lankans after 1815 and who we were before 1815 are analyzed, from elites to ordinary folk, in a very academic way, drawing on many historical texts.

If you are a half-backed history nerd like me, many historical figures from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries pop up in this book, and also many famous historical books from classic, pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial, and contemporary books are referenced, making this book filled with trivia and opinions from the author as well.

SS is a great narrative historian picking on many useful topics of the nineteenth century and making it readable, like telling a story to the reader with his opinions and academic trivia as well. This is a very impactful way of identifying the Sri Lankan history of the 18th-century colonization project.

As 21st-century dwellers who now have foreign fast food franchises all over Sri Lanka and globalization at its peak, with internet and westernization as a history nerd, this book traverses into a very serious period of time in the world where everything began. The inception of globalization and Sri Lanka’s role in it can be understood through a historians Lense, which is the value of this book. As an ardent fan of the city of Kandy and also as a business management student, the history of Sri Lanka when we bowed down to the British powers and the story behind it in a more academic historical perspective is very valuable.

The reading of this book was dragged due to its heavy content, but Ditwa cyclone gave me time to read it. During these somber times, reading history makes you gloomier. But I really needed to read it since it was required to be finished with a very long and impactful literary review, because I attended the Ceylon literary and arts festival of 2025.

Beyond the Sri Lankan Sinhalese nationalism propaganda and my exposure in the Sri Lankan free education system related to Sri Lankan history, Islanded by Prof. SS reveals to us the Protestant Buddhism creation and many power dynamics during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries from a different angle, which is something new to a layman or a student of history.

Orientalism and its impact, and how it was used to govern Sri Lanka, are discussed in this book.

History is boring because it is not dynamic like the present or the future. There are a lot of bounds that follow up from the past that keep Sri Lankans locked in a framework, which makes you hate the island. So this is a must-read to identify what happened to us since the beginning of Sri Lankan history. This gives me the duality of the 1984 novel by George Orwell.

The flexibility and leniency the British showed to Sri Lanka during the colonization project are very much evident when reading this historical fiction book.

As a person who reads for relaxation against the real life failures 'Islanded' was an intimidating read. It was long, biased toward the British, and alienating. But it was knowledgeable. As a person who achieved less academic success, this was a hectic endeavor, making me go through 200-year-old colonization legends that an unmarried failure like me would only read. Otherwise, for a layman of history, this is heavy stuff and very boring.

Some of my personal Kandy experiences are shared below.

[Sharad Pandian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an examination of multiple aspects of Sri Lanka during the first few decades of the 19th century, focusing on its colonization. Quick political background: The Dutch already occupied the Western coast, which the British then took over in 1796. After a failed attempt in 1803, in 1815 the Brits conquered the highland kingdom of Kandy in the Second Kandyan War.

Much of this book isn't new work, Sujit draws on a lot of secondary literature explicitly instead to bring analytical novelty to this topic. In particular, he focuses on how Lanka was "partitioned" (that is, separated from the Indian mainland symbolically and materially) and "islanded" (that is, made or attempted to make into a single political and cultural entity). Split into 8 chapters titled Peoples, Trade, Scholars, Sites, Gardens, Land, Medicine, and Publics, he shows how the British takeover was not a matter of radical break, but involved the strategic use and transformation of existing Dutch and Kandyan/Sri Lankan patterns, including its roads, rituals, institutions, personnel, etc. Neither Kandy or the British colony were hermetic entities that had to wipe out the past to exist, but were each motley entities.

One methodological novelty he introduces is to offset the problem of the abundance of British sources, which have predictably been depended on exclusively. To counter this, he (re)introduces “cross-contextualization, where the copious theories and archives of European scientific history are read alongside the more scarce material traces of non-European peoples." (173-174) In particular, he used palm-leaf texts, and is clear that "Such an enterprise should not count as an attempt to find the “indigenous” in these sources, but to come to the place of science in colonial transition from a diversity of points of view." (174)

As someone who knows very little about Sri Lanka but something about colonial Indian history, it was particularly fascinating to see how many trends in India manifest in Sri Lanka, despite their different political situations (India was run by the East India Company, Sri Lanka was a crown colony) - Orientalist scholars were convinced in both regions that the key to good governance lay in accessing the true history of the region and so launched surveys of the regions (these also collected information on resources). In both places, these surveys were headed by Brits, but used indigenous labour extensively for movement and to access/translate sources. Over time, this "orientalism" fades into Anglicism, where British institutions (in education, medicine, demographics, etc) are emphasized over the recovery and use of native knowledge (although as is emphasized, even this isn't a total replacement of one by the other, but a more complicated story).

One potential criticism I can see: Although Sujit points to how Alexander Johnston, the Sri Lankan surveyor, learnt mathematics from the Governor-General of India, Colin Mackenzie, he fails to point out that Mackenzie had just launched an extensive survey following the fall of the highland state of Mysore. (Also, Johnston will later be given the task of cataloguing Mackenzie's extensive artefacts, which still constitutes one of the largest collections in the British Library). It's connections like these that get missed out by the choice to consider Sri Landa alone, but this is something Sujit is certainly sensitive to:

It is important to underscore that this has not been a comparative history that has considered the colonial transition of Lanka in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries alongside those of India, Mauritius, and the Cape. Nor has it been a traditional connected history. It has kept the specifi city of the island alive, by taking it seriously for itself and by looking at it from multiple points of view from within and without.

This then is clearly a choice, but whether this leaves out too much is unclear.

Overall, there's so much fascinating material here, from thinking about how pilgrimages helped shape the idea of a single entity to how the Brits positioned themselves as the legitimate heirs to the Kandy kingdom using the protection and display of relics like the Buddha’s Tooth and the supposed revitalization of the abandoned holy site of Anuradhapura and ruined reservoirs. It's a fantastic resource, packing a massive amount of information for both novices and those well acquainted.

[Xiaoran Chen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Discussing the process lanka had been conceived and made as island. Evince academic training of author in history of science especially in chapters about garden and medicine. Well done in dealing with the status of lanka both in south asia subcontinent and indian ocean.