Indebtedness, Socio-cultural Hierarchies, and Unfree Labor on Nineteenth-Century Ceylonese Plantations

Slave emancipation in the British Empire in 1834 altered social and economic relationships in Britain’s plantation colonies in ways that had a profound impact not only locally, but also globally. While the British East India Company had occupied parts of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from 1795, the whole of the island came under British administrative control in 1815. Pressure from the colonial office in London to generate local revenue as well as the “laissez-faire” ethos of the period led early governors to stimulate private enterprise in the cultivation of commercial crops. While coffee had been grown in the island on a smallholder basis, its cultivation became particularly lucrative and spread when slavery was abolished in British colonies and preferential tariffs on Jamaican, Dominican, and Guianese coffee entering Britain were removed. As a result, an agricultural economy based on small-holder production was transformed into one dominated by large-scale capitalist plantations. As in other British colonies such as British Guiana and Mauritius, the Ceylonese government encouraged the plantation sector’s development by supporting the creation of needed infrastructure, abolishing export duties on key commercial crops, and even providing land to prospective planters at low cost. These measures resulted in a “great resort of Europeans to Ceylon” and “a large expenditure by them in the cultivation of coffee and sugar” based on the “West India system of cultivation [i.e., plantations].”
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