Abstract:
In February 1796, the British captured the strategic harbour of Trincomalee and
proceeded to expel the Dutch from the island. The government of the maritime provinces
was vested in the Government of Fort St. George and control in Ceylon was exercised
by the military led by Colonel James Stuart. The events that occurred a few months
later, in December 1796 have been described as a ‘full scale revolt against the new
British administration’, as ‘disturbances’ and as ‘riots’ in the rare studies pertaining to the
period that all tend to echo the voice of contemporary witnesses and duplicate the
viewpoint of the report of the De Meuron Commission of Investigation.
The events of 1796-1797 have not evoked a sizeable interest among historians of the
British period mainly because the official documents of the years 1796-1798 are not
available in the Sri Lanka Archives. By far the most details of the events based on
primary sources appear in Colvin R. de Silva’s Ceylon under British Occupation
published in 1942, although the focus of his work is inevitably on the colonial
administration’s response to the revolt rather than on the people as historical agents. My
paper will be based on a reading afresh of those documents at the India Office Library in
London (in June).
Sri Lankan historiography has rarely addressed the issue of the consciousness of the
participants either in the ‘revolt’ of 1797 or even in the more famed revolts that occurred
in 1818 and 1848. I hope to assess the relevance of frames of analysis such as ‘moral
economy of the crowd’, ‘autonomous domain of the subaltern’, ‘legitmation’ to the study
of revolts in Sri Lanka.
Some of the questions I hope to find answers is through a careful reading of colonial
documents as well as the rare petitions written by the ‘natives’ to the British officials are
the following: Was the uprising of 1797 lifted up by a leadership above localism and
generalized into an anti-colonial campaign? Did religion constitute a significant
component of peasant consciousness? If not why did the people rebel? Thus my paper
aims at filling a gap in the scholarship of the British administration of Ceylon of the early
period 1796-1802 which remains one of the most understudied periods of the history of
the island.
