Crime, Justice and Society in Colonial Sri Lanka (1987) examines Sri Lanka's justice system under British rule, and concentrates on two of its aspects: the effectiveness of the administration of law and order, and the relationship between crime and social change. It argues that the colonial judicial system did penetrate rural areas, but did not operate in the way the British intended. Instead, Sri Lankans adapted the state institutions so that they functioned more effectively within indigenous culture.
Recent scholarship has put forward two distinct interpretations of the origins of modern national and communal identity in South Asia. One sees colonial modernity as a radical epistemological break and judges the content of pre-colonial pasts irrelevant for understanding modern politics. According to this view, modern identities are responses to colonial constructions of Asian 'tradition'. The other approach sees continuities between the late pre-colonial and early colonial periods. For these writers, the origins of modern national and communal identities lie not only in colonial interventions, but also in non-colonial eighteenth-century social formations and in early colonial interaction between the British and South Asians.
This article argues that before the 1830s, 'caste' in Lanka fell within the standard range of regional variation found across South Asia. It was only after the 1830s, when the colonial state decided that caste was not a legitimate form of social identification, that the divergence between the island and mainland became marked. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries caste played little role in colonial discourse, but it remained important in social life and elite politics. Given the importance that scholars of India place on official discourse and policy for under standing identity formation, the Lankan case has theoretical and comparative importance.
Theories of crime have long assumed that increased criminality is an inevitable consequence of economic & social progress. In the 1960s, when criminologists turned their attention to the Third World, this view was accepted by scholars who built on modernization theory, & it was left unchallenged by the dependency theorists of the 1970s. However, historical studies of crime have now undermined this assumption: in many nations industrialization, urbanization, & rapid social change have been accompanied by declines in crime. More studies of long-term trends of crime & criminal law are needed before a necessarily complex theory of crime can be advanced that will replace the discredited theories now prevalent. 40 References. HA
Until fairly recently, grain riots were viewed as spontaneous reactions of the poor to hunger, not worthy of detailed analysis. Over the past twenty years, partially as a result of pioneering studies by George Rudé and Edward Thompson with reference to France and Britain, a considerable body of scholarly writing about these disturbances has appeared. Consistent cross-cultural patterns have emerged from this research. Grain riots were not necessarily a product of hunger, although they were a facet of struggles over the control of food. They have normally taken one of two forms. One was the market riot, where the crowd protested against the price or lack of availability of grain. Such disturbances often commenced with the offer to buy grain at a "just" or "customary" price. If this demand was not met, more drastic action was taken. Sometimes rioters seized grain and sold it to the crowd for a just price, and then turned the receipts over to the owners of the grain. More often grain was strewn about, destroyed, or stolen. The second main form of grain riot was the blockade. In times of shortage, people prevented the export of grain from a town or district because they believed that merchants and landlords should not benefit from scarcity and that such exports would drive up the price locally. Sometimes retributive action accompanied or followed both types of protest, meting out punishment to traders, landlords, or others who were perceived as wrongly profiting from food shortages. Such action usually took the form of wholesale looting. In general, grain rioters avoided serious violence.
The social context of land endowed for the maintenance of temples in the Kandyan region of Sri Lanka has long been recognized by scholars as an important topic for historical and sociological research. Most historical writing on the subject is concerned with changes in government policy towards temple endowments after the imposition of British control in 1815. The first forty years of British rule have received more attention than any later period; consequently emphasis has been placed on the gradual of process British disengagement from the pre-colonial policy of close official involvement in the administration of temple land. This research has fruitfully illustrated tensions inherent to colonial rule in the early nineteenth century, especially the conflict between the religious beliefs of the colonizers and the desire to avoid unrest among non-Christians. However, little detailed research has been carried out on either official or popular attitudes towards temple endowments after the colonial government formally gave up its responsibility for their administration in the middle of the nineteenth century. As a result, the uneven and partial official movement towards a reassertion of government control in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is usually portrayed as official recognition of earlier mistakes concerning disestablishment. This view does not take into account the considerable economic importance of the endowments. Changing official attitudes towards religion, as well as internal developments within Buddhism, did indeed influence government policy, but changes in economic policy and in the control and use of land were also important.
The National Archives of Sri Lanka hold a vast number of hitherto little used documents which provide an excellent basis for the study of Sri Lanka under Dutch and British administration. This article is a result of my visit to the Archives to carry out research on crime in Sri Lanka in the second half of the nineteenth century. It seeks to describe some of the opportunities - and difficulties - in using this rich resource.
