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This chapter shows, with attention to the social, political, and polemical contexts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the ways Buddhists and Buddhist sympathizers attempted to align Buddhism with scientific rationalism. A discourse of scientific Buddhism emerged in the context of two intertwined crises: the Victorian crisis of faith in the West and the crisis of colonialism and western hegemony in Asia. In Ceylon, Anagarika Dharmapala promoted the image of Buddhism as scientific to counter denigrations of Buddhism by colonialists and missionaries and to assert its superiority to Christianity. Paul Carus, who through science had lost his faith in traditional Christianity, presented Buddhism as a part of a triumphal vision of science that would eventually lead to a universal “religion of science.” Henry Steel Olcott saw Buddhism as representing an “occult science” aligned with Theosophy and spiritualism.

This chapter describes the history and continuing impact of the rust fungus, Hemileia vastatrix, on coffee crops. In the 19th century, this pathogen wiped-out coffee crops in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and transformed the country into a tea-producing island. The scientist Harry Marshall Ward played a key role in the story of coffee rust, and was posted to Ceylon in 1880 to identify the cause of the epidemic. Coffee rust remains an exceedingly important agricultural problem in the developing world. A diversity of stories about the biology and sociology of this fungal disease of international importance is presented.

Much of the functioning of the imperial economy depended on the movement of ‘non‐white’ migrants, especially indentured labourers. Some were recruited in the Pacific islands for work in Queensland, until Australian legislation obliged almost all to leave. Most were from India, and worked especially on plantations in the Caribbean, Fiji, Natal, Malaya, Mauritius, and Ceylon. Many others, also especially from India, were free migrants, responding to domestic pressures and taking up perceived labour and entrepreneurial opportunities as in East and southern Africa. Similarly motivated were Chinese immigrants. Most such people fitted into the dual labour market model, working under white supervision, often temporarily overseas. Large numbers, often maintaining their cultural identities, also settled abroad, though entry and settlement were made difficult until recently by immigration controls erected around white settler societies.

The shifting and various identities of both official and unofficial members of the British community in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) are explored in this chapter and are revealed to change according to time, place, class, and gender. Planter and administrator shared a common British identity exemplified in the need to differentiate themselves from the indigenous population through such things as dress codes, food, leisure activities all institutionalized in those most iconic symbols of colonial life – the club and hill station. This common identity did not, however, preclude conflict over competing interests and perceptions. The life of British nurses and that of planters' wives and daughters illustrate that what it meant to be white, British and female similarly diverged. Ceylon's long period of decolonization further challenged this constructed and imagined identity. What it meant to be British and colonial is shown to be ambiguous and ever changing.

This chapter describes the internal administration and foreign relations of the Mauryan empire under the reign of Aśoka. It explains that the establishment of the Mauryan state ushered in a new form of government, that of a centralised empire. Under this regime, the king had the central authority, and he not only defended social usage according to the traditional concept of kingship, but could also make his own laws. It was because of this increased power of the king that the Mauryan centralised monarchy became a paternal despotism under Aśoka. This chapter describes the Mauryan state's relationship with Kalinga and Ceylon. It suggests that Aśoka's relationship with Ceylon was not purely political, because though there may have been a considerable exchange of missions, Ceylon remained an independent kingdom.

The historiography of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from the early 19th century to the 1830s was profoundly affected by the British conquest of the littoral districts during 1795–96, and the absorption from 1815 to 1818 of the interior Kandyan kingdom, the last of a long line of Sinhalese kingdoms. The last quarter of the 19th century may be described as the second stage in the rediscovery of Sri Lanka’s ancient past. The most striking feature of historical scholarship on the island at that time is a comparative paucity of books and monographs. Four scholars, three Sri Lankans and the other a British civil servant, have established the focus on Sri Lanka within an Imperial context. In Britain, Sri Lanka lay in the shadow of Indian history.

This chapter presents a discussion on the dissolution of the British Empire. In particular, it deals with the critical cases of India, Palestine, Burma, Ceylon, Egypt, the Sudan, Malaya, the West Indies, and tropical Africa. Above all, it explains how the initial phase of disengagement, presided over by Clement Attlee, eventually found its culmination in the era of liquidation dominated by Harold Macmillan. There were three main periods. The first was that of the Labour government, 1945–51; the second that of the Tory governments of Sir Winston Churchill and Sir Anthony Eden, 1951–7; and the third that of Macmillan from 1957. The immediate causes of the end of the British Empire are to be found not only in the nationalist movements in Empire itself but also in the lessons learned from the Algerian revolution and in the danger of Soviet intervention in the Congo. It is shown that the international climate expedited the advance to independence, but the circumstances varied from region to region, from colony to colony.

Ceylon has several claims to occupy a special place in British colonial history. Ceylon's place in colonial history is not confined to its status as Britain's model colony. On the contrary, in Ceylon's case the triumph of moderate nationalism coincided with a resurgence of religion as a significant force in the political process. Lord Donoughmore was appointed to examine the Ceylon constitution in 1927. With a view to the eradication of communalism, the Donoughmore Commission made its most startling and controversial recommendation. Equally controversial during the period of the Donoughmore constitution, and indeed right up to independence and beyond, was the position of the Indian Tamil community in Ceylon. Unlike their counterparts in India and Burma, the political leadership in Ceylon co-operated with Britain in the war and, ultimately, Ceylon's wartime role as a major source of raw materials and as a strategic base worked to the advantage of the island's nationalists. Ceylon was independent but the real test of nationhood lay ahead.

This chapter traces the career of Frances E. Willis, the first US female ambassador to have emerged from the career Foreign Service. After earning a PhD in political science, Willis became just the third woman to enter the US Foreign Service (1927) and slowly ascended through the ranks despite blatant sex discrimination. Named by Dwight D. Eisenhower ambassador to Switzerland (1953–1957, a time during which Swiss women could not yet vote) and then Norway (1957–1961), and by John F. Kennedy as ambassador to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka, 1961–1964), Willis served in the Foreign Service for thirty-seven years. While prone to micromanagement (the result of rules mastery adopted as a bureaucratic self-defense practice), Willis received high marks from superiors and host countries alike, even when called upon to promote controversial US policies.

The author talks about his voyage to Ceylon, Cingalese gentlemen, Aden, Ass-equipages, the Kaba, Eve's burial-place, the selfishness of John Bull, Grand Cairo, Mohamed Alí, Arabic as the language of the húris, Alexandria, Gibraltar, and his arrival at the ‘Mother-bank’.

This essay examines the religion provisions of the constitution of Ceylon/Sri Lanka on the cusp of the country’s independence from Britain. Schonthal problematizes the presumption that religious freedom stands outside of struggles for power by presenting the specific historical conditions in which particular and partial conceptions of religious rights jostled for authority at a formative moment in modern Sri Lankan history.

In the nineteenth century, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was acclaimed as a ‘Scotch’ colony due especially to Scottish influence in the coffee and tea enterprises. Yet if Scottish ethnicity was hailed for economic prowess on the island, signs of origin were far less likely to feature on migrant headstones. Instead, noting occupation and cause of death were more prevalent ways of commemorating the deceased. What though, explains the general absence of Scottish ethnicity on Ceylon death markers and do they resemble the general disinterest in remembering the ethnic origins of the dead of various other national groups in Ceylon? How did such headstones compare with their compatriots in Australasia? This chapter draws on research emanating from several cemeteries in Ceylon to explore reasons for the presence and absence of ethnicity on the gravestones.

This chapter discusses the life of Leonard Woolf. It details his childhood, his years in Ceylon, his marriage to Virginia, his sexual life, his happy intimate relationship with Trekkie Parsons after Virginia's death, his work as a journalist and editor for several magazines, and his final years.

This chapter reconsiders the intellectual history of the colonial transition from an island space that saw texts and other forms of religious culture arrive, depart, and sustain themselves across the sea. It explains how British colonial policy in Ceylon shifted in line with changing notions of Buddhism, consistent with the global expansion of the British empire. The first part of the chapter focuses on intellectual networks and the passage of skills, artifacts, and texts between eighteenth-century Buddhism and the British, and between Ceylon and London. The second part shows how these scholarly traditions were molded by colonialism in a global age of empire.

This chapter examines the colonial context of Cameron’s practice as a photographer, examining her first important fancy subject, Paul and Virginia, the title of a Romantic novel by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. The chapter explains the novel’s impact and analyzes its importance to Thomas Carlyle, whose publications declared England an “Anglo-Saxon home,” and to Cameron and her circle, who understood the image as a metaphor for the mythic origins of British national identity.

In 1874, Cameron left England for Ceylon, and two years later, when the painter Marianne North visited her, both women produced works of art in each other’s presence that expressed cultural displacement and embedded political commentaries on exoticism, cultural inferiority, and dependence. The final chapter examines the work of both artists in relation to their confrontation with colonialism. Cameron’s imagery is examined as both a ‘return to origins’ and an act of redemption. Cameron’s photograph depicting Marianne North looking up from reading George Eliot’s recently serialized novel, Daniel Deronda, is analysed in depth, arguing that the photographer included this book in her portrait of North as an important symbol because of the significance of Eliot’s work, which helps to ground the two women in place and time, as well as mark the colonialists’ conflict in larger terms. Eliot’s book is connected to Cameron’s photography, in which the search for a mythic return to origins is measured by the artists’ effort to reclaim a ‘lost’ and foreign land, all in view of extending the nation’s borders on the political map as an act of redemption.

This chapter examines the symbolic geography of Ceylon as a scientific site. It suggests that the scale of inquiry in Ceylon included the ways in which nineteenth-century networks of colonial understanding about that island could not be separated from questions about the physical topography of the island itself. This chapter also contends that the twin topography of Ceylon and their long-standing iconic associations were constitutive of relations between British natural history and the natural knowledge that Kandyans cultivated around Buddhist temples.