At the beginning of Sujit Sivasundaram's Islanded, we read that historians of South Asia largely overlook Sri Lanka, or Ceylon, as it was known during the colonial and immediate postcolonial periods (p. 17). One reason, of course, is that it is a small island off the southeastern coast of India and it cannot compete for attention with its large and powerful neighbor. But another reason suggested by Sivasundaram is that Sri Lanka was “islanded”—that it underwent a process of “partitioning” whereby its British colonial rulers separated it from India administratively, economically, and religiously, so that by the middle of the nineteenth century Sri Lanka was seen as distinct from India.

Sivasundaram's well-written and well-researched book is a history of how the British came to create a Crown colony after they had seized the island's coastal territories from the Dutch in 1796 and had defeated the inland kingdom of Kandy in 1815. The book ends with the introduction of reforms in the 1830s that are sometimes seen as marking the beginning of a fully formed colonial state on the island.

During the course of his analysis, Sivasundaram focuses on a number of practices that the British engaged in—including trade, scholarship on Buddhism, botany, and surveying—to suggest that the British used traditions and conventions that they inherited and witnessed to create a colony that was at once seen as separate from India and the wider Indian Ocean world and at the same time divided internally between the highlands around Kandy and the lowlands bordering the ocean. He insists that we should not employ the easy dichotomies of indigenous-colonial or highland-lowland to characterize the kind of governance that was established over the island during these years. Instead, he notes that evidence exists that points to the British incorporating or, as he puts it, “recycling” Dutch, Sinhalese, Tamil, and other assumptions, perspectives, and habits as they formulated their own impressions of Sri Lanka.

One example concerns the creation of a botanical garden at Peradeniya. Sivasundaram traces the history of its establishment, first outside of Colombo and then, after the defeat of the Kandyan kingdom, to a temple garden just outside Kandy. He notes that the original British conception for the garden never materialized. Instead the garden took its shape due to happenstance—changes in leadership—and local knowledge and labor. Another example highlights the ways the British incorporated Dutch surveyors and knowledge in creating a new survey department and indigenous forms of forced labor in the construction of roads.

Sivasundaram spends considerable time detailing the ways Sri Lankans contributed to British knowledge about the island. Early colonial officials relied heavily on their assistants and contacts for information on every aspect of Sri Lankan life, from Buddhism to the condition of water reservoirs, and Sivasundaram explains eloquently how information was appropriated and sometimes misunderstood. This “recycling” and “movement” of ideas and opinions helps characterize early colonial rule in Sri Lanka and, for Sivasundaram, moves the discussion away from the debate about a “transition” to colonial rule. A consequence of such an approach is that opposition to colonial rule may be underemphasized. Sivasundaram does introduce the reader to incidences of rebellion and exile, and he does describe the brutality of forced labor, but his focus on the transmission of knowledge may downplay Sri Lankan hostility to British colonialism.

While one of the book's great strengths is its breadth, showing how colonial perspectives were constructed in Sri Lanka across a variety of fields, a weakness is that it does not adequately address the creation of the colonial administration. Sivasundaram describes the actions of some early governors and, in the final chapter, discusses the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms of the 1830s, but it would be interesting to know whether Dutch or other Sri Lankan influences, perhaps even from Kandy, conditioned the assembling and development of the British colonial administration during the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Sivasundaram's study relies on palm leaf manuscripts, a rereading of the colonial archive, and a dialogue with contemporary historiography. The result is a convincing and engaging contribution to South Asian studies. It will certainly be read with great interest by scholars of colonial Sri Lanka, but it deserves to be read more broadly since it provides a model for how to understand the early development of a British colony.