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Sri Lanka The Dutch
The Dutch became involved in the politics of the Indian Ocean
in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Headquartered at
Batavia in modern Indonesia, the Dutch moved to wrest control of
the highly profitable spice trade from the Portuguese. The Dutch
began negotiations with King Rajasinha II of Kandy in 1638. A
treaty assured the king assistance in his war against the
Portuguese in exchange for a monopoly of the island's major trade
goods, particularly cinnamon. Rajasinha also promised to pay the
Dutch's war-related expenses. The Portuguese fiercely resisted
the Dutch and the Kandyans and were expelled only gradually from
their strongholds. The Dutch captured the eastern ports of
Trincomalee and Batticaloa in 1639 and restored them to the
Sinhalese. But when the southwestern and western ports of Galle
and Negombo fell in 1640, the Dutch refused to turn them over to
the king of Kandy. The Dutch claimed that Rajasinha had not
reimbursed them for their vastly inflated claims for military
expenditures. This pretext allowed the Dutch to control the
island's richest cinnamon lands. The Dutch ultimately presented
the king of Kandy with such a large bill for help against the
Portuguese that the king could never hope to repay it. After
extensive fighting, the Portuguese surrendered Colombo in 1656
and Jaffna, their last stronghold, in 1658. Superior economic
resources and greater naval power enabled the Dutch to dominate
the Indian Ocean. They attacked Portuguese positions throughout
South Asia and in the end allowed their adversaries to keep only
their settlement at Goa.
The king of Kandy soon realized that he had replaced one foe
with another and proceeded to incite rebellion in the lowlands
where the Dutch held sway. He even attempted to ally the British
in Madras in his struggle to oust the Dutch. These efforts ended
with a serious rebellion against his rule in 1664. The Dutch
profited from this period of instability and extended the
territory under their control. They took over the remaining
harbors and completely cordoned off Kandy, thereby making the
highland kingdom landlocked and preventing it from allying itself
with another foreign power
(see
fig. 2). This strategy, combined
with a concerted Dutch display of force, subdued the Kandyan
kings. Henceforth, Kandy was unable to offer significant
resistance except in its internal frontier regions. The Dutch and
the Kingdom of Kandy eventually settled down to an uneasy modus
vivendi, partly because the Dutch became less aggressive. Despite
underlying hostility between Kandy and the Dutch, open warfare
between them occurred only once--in 1762--when the Dutch,
exasperated by Kandy's provocation of riots in the lowlands,
launched a punitive expedition. The expedition met with disaster,
but a better-planned second expedition in 1765 forced the
Kandyans to sign a treaty that gave the Dutch sovereignty over
the lowlands. The Dutch, however, maintained their pretension
that they administered the territories under their control as
agents of the Kandyan ruler.
After taking political control of the island, the Dutch
proceeded to monopolize trade. This monopoly was at first limited
to cinnamon and elephants but later extended to other goods.
Control was vested in the Dutch East India Company, a joint-stock
corporation, which had been established for the purpose of
carrying out trade with the islands of Indonesia but was later
called upon to exercise sovereign responsibilities in many parts
of Asia.
The Dutch tried with little success to supplant Roman
Catholicism with Protestantism. They rewarded native conversion
to the Dutch Reformed Church with promises of upward mobility,
but Catholicism was too deeply rooted. (In the 1980s, the
majority of Sri Lankan Christians remained Roman Catholics.) The
Dutch were far more tolerant of the indigenous religions than the
Portuguese; they prohibited open Buddhist and Hindu religious
observance in urban areas, but did not interfere with these
practices in rural areas. The Dutch banned Roman Catholic
practices, however. They regarded Portuguese power and
Catholicism as mutually interdependent and strove to safeguard
against the reemergence of the former by persecuting the latter.
They harassed Catholics and constructed Protestant chapels on
confiscated church property.
The Dutch contributed significantly to the evolution of the
judicial, and, to a lesser extent, administrative systems on the
island. They codified indigenous law and customs that did not
conflict directly with Dutch-Roman jurisprudence. The outstanding
example was Dutch codification of the Tamil legal code of Jaffna-
-the Thesavalamai. To a small degree, the Dutch altered the
traditional land grant and tenure system, but they usually
followed the Portuguese pattern of minimal interference with
indigenous social and cultural institutions. The provincial
governors of the territories of Jaffnapatam, Colombo, and
Trincomalee were Dutch. These rulers also supervised various
local officials, most of whom were the traditional
mudaliyar (headmen).
The Dutch, like the Portuguese before them, tried to entice
their fellow countrymen to settle in Sri Lanka, but attempts to
lure members of the upper class, especially women, were not very
successful. Lower-ranking military recruits, however, responded
to the incentive of free land, and their marriages to local women
added another group to the island's already small but established
population of Eurasians--the Portuguese Burghers. The Dutch
Burghers formed a separate and privileged ethnic group on the
island in the twentieth century.
During the Dutch period, social differences between lowland
and highland Sinhalese hardened, forming two culturally and
politically distinct groups. Western customs and laws
increasingly influenced the lowland Sinhalese, who generally
enjoyed a higher standard of living and greater literacy. Despite
their relative economic and political decline, the highland
Sinhalese were nonetheless proud to have retained their political
independence from the Europeans and thus considered themselves
superior to the lowland Sinhalese.
Data as of October 1988
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