Well before the treaty between the King of Kandy Rajasingha II and the Dutch was signed in 1638—in which the Dutch agreed to provide military support to the king to expel the Portuguese from the island—the Dutch had realised how important it was for their commercial interests to have control over the affairs of the Southwestern parts of the island, which appear on their early maps as “Kaneel Land” (land of cinnamon). As well as cinnamon, by far the most significant commodity from the island, there were a number of other commercially important items, such as elephants, pearls, precious stones, and areca nuts, that interested the Dutch.

However, by the time the Portuguese were expelled from the island in 1658 through the combined efforts of the Dutch and the King of Kandy, the relationship between the two allies had deteriorated. This was certainly an unwelcome development from the point of view of the commercial interests of the Dutch. What they really wanted was to occupy the Kingdom of Kandy, an endeavour in which they had failed miserably. When Rajasingha II decided to end hostilities with the Dutch at the closing phase of his long reign as the King of Kandy, the Dutch too had come to the realisation that peaceful co-existence with Kandy would be the best way to achieve their goal.

Consolidating Power

Governor Laurens Pyl (1680–1692) succeeded Ryklof van Goens de Jonge who, in his turn, had succeeded his father Ryklof van Goens. Governor Pyl radically deviated from his successors in his policy towards Kandy. Knowing that Rajasingha II had clearly abandoned his aggressive policy towards the Dutch, Pyl took a series of positive measures to inaugurate a new era of Dutch-Kandyan relations. Although a closer examination of this fascinating development is outside the scope of this essay, it is possible to argue that his approach prepared the ground for a new era of European domination in Sri Lanka. The character of this new era can be summarised as follows: shifting the focus from expanding territorial gains vis-à-vis the Kingdom of Kandy, the Dutch administration now trained its sights on the consolidation of its position in the territory it already dominated. Although the Dutch formally recognised the King of Kandy as the “Emperor of Ceylon,” in practice that recognition was merely symbolic and tactical. For all the practical purpose, they exercised de facto control over the territory. After Rajasingha II abandoned his aggressive approach towards the Dutch, the latter found themselves in a position to focus on extracting maximum benefit from the territory.

It needs to be emphasised that the administration of the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East-India Company, generally known as the VOC) was exclusively interested in maximising profit. The VOC directors in Amsterdam were driven by the desire to obtain the entire cinnamon production of the island with as little cost incurred for the company as possible. Rijklof van Goens, both as the governor of the Dutch possessions in Sri Lanka and later as the governor-general in Batavia (now Jakarta), succeeded in convincing the directors that the best way to realise this goal was to take control of the entire island. However, the vigour of Van Goens’ narrative gradually weakened as it became clear that the suggested goal was unachievable. Therefore, a clear policy shift emerged from the 1680s onwards.

As already mentioned, the most prominent aspect of the new policy was peaceful co-existence with Kandy. This served two main purposes. Most importantly, it reduced the military cost. Moreover, this new policy enabled the Dutch to significantly benefit from the economic activities in the Kandyan territory. The other important aspect of the policy shift was to devise an effective administration of the economic and social life of the population of the Dutch territory so that maximum economic benefit could be obtained.

Population control

The Dutch administration had realised that they faced two challenges when trying to meet this goal. First, they needed to decide how best to neutralise the power of the indigenous elite, which held competing interests with the Dutch in exploiting the peasant surplus. For the Dutch, the support of the indigenous elite was indispensable, and therefore any hostile confrontation would be extremely damaging. Second, the Dutch needed to find a way to dominate the peasants, whose labour was their main source of income. The Dutch administration had no mechanism via which to reach out to the peasants without the support of the indigenous elite. Moreover, Dutch demands for higher surplus from the peasants did not exactly appear a welcome proposition. Unsurprisingly, meeting these two challenges occupied much of the affairs of the Dutch administration of the Western and Southern parts of the island.

There is a vast array of literature on how the Dutch faced up to this challenge. Taken together, these works reveal the emergence of a new type of relationship between the governor and the governed. Although the Dutch continued to claim that their relationship with the people was in line with the age-old traditions of the island, the peasants seem to have perceived the Dutch as violating the old traditions. When attempts were made to maximise the surplus extraction from the peasants, the measures met with strong resistance. A wave of gradually worsening peasant resistance all but destroyed the relationship with Kandy, as well as with the indigenous chiefs in the Dutch territory.

Understanding of the circumstances that brought the Dutch and Kandy into a five-year war is central to this discussion. Among historians, there is consensus that the Dutch-Kandyan war of 1762-1766 was fundamentally linked with the peasant uprising. Jan Schreuder, the Dutch governor when the war began in 1761, tried his best to convince the higher authorities that the rebellion in the Dutch territory was due to the provocation of the Kandyan court. Indeed, while Kirti Sri Rajasingha did support the rebels, this certainly overlooks the peasant origins of the rebellion in the late 1750s. This rebellion is indelibly linked to the longstanding discontent of the peasants, whose lives were severely affected by the measures implemented by the Dutch administration.

Mechanisms for profit

At the initial phase of the “long” eighteenth century, the Dutch attempted to maximise the level of surplus extraction from the peasants by using pre-existing mechanisms. Yet new administrative tools, such as Plakkaten‘placard’, published legal proclamations in the VOC’s overseas territories.  More, were also effectively used for this purpose. Priority was given to protecting the cinnamon trees, mainly by discouraging slash and burn cultivation, as well as to effective mobilisation of the SalagāmaCaste-group primarily associated with cinnamon peeling. During pre-colonial times they had predominantly worked as farmers only occasionally producing cinnamon for local elites like the kings. In colonial times the maintenance of the cinnamon forests and the production of consumable cinnamon became their primary task. More —a social caste associated with cinnamon peeling. These measures became highly unpopular amongst the peasants and led to a wave of protests in the 1730s. The Dutch administration assumed that the root cause of the unrest lay with the indigenous chiefs who, they assumed, were manipulating the peasants. The Dutch, therefore, focused on the need to bypass the indigenous chiefs and bring the peasants, as well as the chiefs themselves, under the direct control of the Dutch administration.

Registration of land and people through the system of thombosFrom the Portuguese ‘tombo’, which translates as tome or volume, these land and population registers had pre-colonial roots in the palm-leaf inscribed ‘lēkam miti’ registers. First translated by the Portuguese, by the second half of the eighteenth century under Dutch these centralised registers contained the names of hundreds of thousands of local inhabitants and their property in the form of sowing fields, gardens and plantations. Read more in our longread. More—the mapping and surveying of lands—and the establishment and effective use of the LandraadLiterally translates as ‘land council’ or ‘rural council’, this colonial court dealt with legal conflicts between mostly local litigant parties. Additionally they were responsible for the maintenance of the population and land registers known as the thombos. More system, as well as the reorganisation of the remuneration for the chiefs, were some of the important measures that were introduced to govern the territory. A considerable push towards early urbanisation was also notable in this process. New urban centres, such as Colombo, Galle, Jaffna, Matara, and Batticaloa, became important for future developments.

This had important consequences. First, these measures represent new forms of the “governmentalisation” of the relationship between the state and ordinary people. Second, rather than easing the situation, as was expected by the architects of these new measures, they instead led to new forms of political antagonism between the government and the governed. It is possible to argue that both these aspects produced a prototype of the modern political domain and led to the production of the individual subject as defined through a new legal discourse, and the emergence of a new domain of resistance exercised by the people.

The impact of the transformation that the Dutch administration went through in the “long” eighteenth century was highly significant in the transformation of pre-European political subjectivity. The major transformation that occurred during this period in the region administered by the Dutch prepared favourable ground for modern developments that would come to fruition throughout the nineteenth century.

This long read is an excerpt from Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri’s chapter ‘Sri Lanka in the Eighteenth Century – The Historical Context’ in Weapons of Persuasion. The global wanderings of six Kandyan objects (2023), by Alicia Schrikker and Doreen van den Boogaart (eds.) Published by Tambapanni Academic Publishers, Colombo.