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dc.contributor.authorCasinader, Niranjan
dc.contributor.authorDeSilva Wijeyeratne, Bede
dc.contributor.authorGodden, Lee
dc.date.accessioned2019-05-29T13:04:55Z
dc.date.available2019-05-29T13:04:55Z
dc.date.issued2018
dc.identifier.issn2049-677X
dc.identifier.doi10.1080/2049677X.2018.1469273
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10072/379935
dc.description.abstractThe Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms (1831) have been characterised by David Scott (1995) as marking the transformation of colonial Sri Lanka from one kind of political rationality – that of mercantile sovereignty – to another – that of colonial governmentality. Whilst consonant with the view that the Commission marked a moment when the colonial administration moved away from a strategic reliance on Asokan or Buddhist forms of authority in the earliest phase of British rule, we argue that there is a more nuanced genealogy to this transition. The Reforms, while directed to the administration, judicial and political institutions of the colony, also contemplated extensive commercial restructuring that inculcated a self- improvement mode into ‘everyday life’. Drawing on colonial archives, we show how elements of a logic of governmentality, such as educational, land, and fiscal reform, were utilised at different times by the colonial administration to commence the modernisation of the colony well before 1832. It is also evident that the transformation was partial, and at points strongly resisted by local Buddhist communities. Instead of marking a clear point of transformation, the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms gave legibility and a national imprimatur to a process already in train, while providing further impetus to a socio-political rationality that had begun to shift decades prior. The secular logic of the colonial State, however, was later to unleash a movement of Sinhalese Buddhist reform and cultural re-valuation that generated, ‘a more modernised Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism to create expanding areas of social, cultural and religious life for the nationalist cause.’
dc.description.peerreviewedYes
dc.languageEnglish
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisherRoutledge
dc.publisher.placeUnited Kingdom
dc.relation.ispartofpagefrom34
dc.relation.ispartofpageto64
dc.relation.ispartofissue1
dc.relation.ispartofjournalComparative Legal History
dc.relation.ispartofvolume6
dc.subject.fieldofresearchLaw not elsewhere classified
dc.subject.fieldofresearchLaw
dc.subject.fieldofresearchOther Law and Legal Studies
dc.subject.fieldofresearchcode180199
dc.subject.fieldofresearchcode1801
dc.subject.fieldofresearchcode1899
dc.titleFrom sovereignty to modernity: revisiting the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms - transforming the Buddhist and colonial imaginary in nineteenth-century Ceylon
dc.typeJournal article
dc.type.descriptionC1 - Articles
dc.type.codeC - Journal Articles
dc.description.versionAccepted Manuscript (AM)
gro.rights.copyright© 2018 Taylor & Francis (Routledge). This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly on 26 Apr 2018, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2018.1469273
gro.hasfulltextFull Text
gro.griffith.authorDeSilva Wijeyeratne, Bede R.


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