British Ceylon

British Ceylon ran from 1815, when the kingdom of Kandy was annexed, to independence in 1948. The coasts had already changed hands twice: the Portuguese arrived in 1505 and were displaced by the Dutch in the 1650s, who were displaced by the British during the Napoleonic wars. Kandy in the interior mountains had resisted all three for three centuries and fell through a treaty with its own nobles, who deposed their king and then revolted in 1817 when they understood the terms. Britain made the island a plantation economy. Coffee first, then a leaf blight destroyed it in the 1870s, and then tea, which required labour the Sinhalese would not supply on those terms. Around a million Tamil workers were brought from southern India to the highland estates over several decades, creating a population distinct from the Tamils already long settled in the north. That is one root of the later civil war. Colombo grew as a port and an English-speaking professional class emerged, which produced the constitutional nationalist movement. Universal suffrage came in 1931, earlier than anywhere else in Asia or Africa under colonial rule. Independence on 4 February 1948 was negotiated and peaceful. Within a year the new government disenfranchised most of the estate Tamils, and the language act of 1956 made Sinhala the sole official language. The country was renamed Sri Lanka in 1972. Kandy had held out longer against Europeans than any other polity in South Asia. Cinnamon was the Dutch obsession and the reason they came. Ceylon supplied a large share of the world's tea within thirty years of the coffee blight. The name Ceylon survives commercially on tea packets long after it left the map.

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