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Lives, Land, and Labour: A Social History of Eighteenth-Century Sri Lanka
Series: - European Expansion and Indigenous Response, Volume: 51
Author:
The "Thombos" are a rather unique collection of eighteenth-century land and population registers detailing the lives lived, lands held, and labour provided by tens of thousands of people inhabiting the coastal regions of Sri Lanka that were colonised by the Dutch East India Company. Turning this archive inside out by highlighting both the indigenous and colonial roots of this administrative system, Luc Bulten presents a gateway into everyday social realities surrounding caste, conjugality, (forced) work, and land tenure. In doing so, he demonstrates how both European expansionism and local agency reciprocally affected the ways such social realities were shaped.
Luc Bulten is Postdoctoral Fellow in Sri Lankan History at the University of Cambridge, and Assistant Professor of Social and Economic History at Radboud University. He primarily studies the intersection between societies in Southern Asia and European colonialism.
General Series Editor’s Foreword
Acknowledgements
List of Maps, Figures, and Tables
Glossary
Maps
Introduction
1 Lives
2 Land
3 Labour
1 Situating Sri Lanka: History & Historiography
1 History
2 Historiography
2 Registration in Early Modern Lanka
1 Registration before and Directly after Colonialism
2 (Dis)Continuities: Early ‘Dutch Thombos’ and Para-Colonial Bureaucracies
3 Centralisation and Expansion of the Thombo Registry
3 Co-Constructing Knowledge? Intermediaries and Bureaucracy
1 Elite Rivalry between Company and Chiefs
2 Agents of Administration I: Renters & Envoys
3 Agents of Administration II: Clerks and Scribes
4 Being Registered: Local Responses to Documentation and Governance
1 Spaces of Negotiation
2 Tactics of Negotiation
3 Language of Negotiation
5 Categories in Conflict: Land Tenure, Land Grabbing
1 Classifying Property
2 Access to Company’s Land I: Taxes and Labour
3 Access to Company’s Land II: the Promise of Plantations
6 Registers Inside-Out: Labour Regimes and Families in a Colonial Archive
1 Solidifying Caste and Labour
2 Paper versus Practice
3 The Family in the Register
7 Appropriating the Appropriated: Utilising Colonial Institutions
1 The Thombos in Court
2 Afterlife: Counting Extracts
Conclusion: Understanding Institutions
Epilogue: A Reflection on the Local, the Social, and the Global
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
List of Maps, Figures, and Tables
Glossary
Maps
Introduction
1 Lives
2 Land
3 Labour
Part 1: Understanding the Archive
1 Situating Sri Lanka: History & Historiography
1 History
2 Historiography
2 Registration in Early Modern Lanka
1 Registration before and Directly after Colonialism
2 (Dis)Continuities: Early ‘Dutch Thombos’ and Para-Colonial Bureaucracies
3 Centralisation and Expansion of the Thombo Registry
3 Co-Constructing Knowledge? Intermediaries and Bureaucracy
1 Elite Rivalry between Company and Chiefs
2 Agents of Administration I: Renters & Envoys
3 Agents of Administration II: Clerks and Scribes
4 Being Registered: Local Responses to Documentation and Governance
1 Spaces of Negotiation
2 Tactics of Negotiation
3 Language of Negotiation
Part 2: Turning the Archive Inside Out
5 Categories in Conflict: Land Tenure, Land Grabbing
1 Classifying Property
2 Access to Company’s Land I: Taxes and Labour
3 Access to Company’s Land II: the Promise of Plantations
6 Registers Inside-Out: Labour Regimes and Families in a Colonial Archive
1 Solidifying Caste and Labour
2 Paper versus Practice
3 The Family in the Register
7 Appropriating the Appropriated: Utilising Colonial Institutions
1 The Thombos in Court
2 Afterlife: Counting Extracts
Conclusion: Understanding Institutions
Epilogue: A Reflection on the Local, the Social, and the Global
Bibliography
Index
This book is aimed at both specialists of South Asian history (specifically that of Sri Lanka), but also those more broadly interested in (early modern) social and global history.