AHR Forum Ethnicity, Indigeneity, and Migration in the Advent of British Rule to Sri Lanka SUJIT SIVASUNDARAM THE SPATIALLY BOUNDED FORM of the small island or constellation of small islands has often been a convenient receptacle for the idea of the polity, whether precolonial, colonial, or national. At the same time, the island space has generated a rich and contradictory discourse encompassing ideas of utopia, paradise, sexuality, degen- eration, and disease. As Greg Dening magisterially writes of the Marquesas, “Cross- ing beaches is always dramatic. From land to sea and from sea to land is a long journey and either way the voyager is left a foreigner and an outsider.” 1 Yet scholars have been taken captive by the structural ease and descriptive density with which islands have been made in history, so that an island or group of islands has seemed a natural unit of analysis. Dening’s point that islands are essentially polyglot is crit- ical. In creating island states and peoples, colonists and nationalists buried the creole and hybrid in a turn to the indigenous, endangered, and fragile. In other words, they searched after what was apparently found in the island and nowhere else. The legacy of island-making has meant that until recently, world historians spent more time with large landmasses than with small and curious places at the edges of the map that are seemingly anomalous. 2 Sri Lanka is such a space, and one that has been marginalized in historical writing. One obvious reason why this island space has received so little attention is the question of where it figures in scholarly geographies: Does it belong in Southeast Asia or South Asia? Yet this unhelpful scholarly quan- dary is itself a relic of colonial island-making. The narrative of British colonialism from the last decade of the eighteenth century reveals a story of experimentation. The paper on which this article is based was first written and presented in the course of an Early Career Fellowship at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge. It also benefited from comments at the University of Oxford, South Asian History Seminar. More recently, it was closely read for a workshop on Sri Lankan history organized by the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies at the Annual South Asian Studies meeting at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In par- ticular I thank John Rogers for his detailed comments, Sumit Guha and Derek Peterson for their as- sistance, Ramya Sreenivansan and Anne Hansen for their commentaries on the paper, and the editors of and anonymous referees for the AHR . 1 Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourses on a Silent Land—Marquesas, 1774 –1880 (Honolulu, 1980), 32. For the history of island-making, see also Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith, eds., Islands in History and Representation (London, 2003). 2 The growth of Atlantic and Pacific oceanic history has, however, started to change this, and the Indian Ocean historiography is also starting to catch up. For critical overviews of these fields, see “AHR Forum: Oceans of History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 717–780; and also Markus P. M. Vink, “Indian Ocean Studies and the New Thalassology,” Journal of Global History 2 (2007): 41–62. 428 at University of Cambridge on May 31, 2016 http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from