Ashin Das Gupta demonstrated in his work Malabar in Asian Trade that regional history located in South Asia can be reached through careful readings of European sources, in this case Dutch, produced as a consequence of expansion in the Indian Ocean. However, presented with similar materials (Portuguese and Dutch), the Sri Lankan historiography of the 1950s to 1980s roughly covering the periods of 1500-1800 has not been as concerned with describing regional history as much as explaining the form and function of the European enterprises themselves (i.e., their economic activities, their “colonial” nature of rule and the reasons for why one replaced the other).Footnote ¹ Generally, the tendency to study regional island history in this period has depended on studies of “kingship”, and given the nature of the sources (i.e., panegyric, Buddhist texts, rituals/ceremonies and Buddhist temple artwork) such studies have focused on kingly power and legitimacy being heavily coloured by Buddhist religious themes.Footnote ²

The Portuguese in Sri Lanka and South India is a collection of revised articles by Zoltán Biedermann, from 2005 to 2010, that attempts to combine the history of Portuguese expansion with regional histories, something that the author feels is not being achieved as of late (1). The volume’s short introduction makes up the first chapter. The second chapter, “Negotiating Empire” is a general survey of diplomatic history in Asia in the sixteenth century and does not seem specifically weighted toward Sri Lanka or South India. The fourth chapter, “Imagining Space before Conquest”, looks at changes in maps produced between the periods of 1568 and 1606 and argues that the shifting interest in conquest changed how the island was represented. The sixth chapter, “Colonialism and Cosmopolitanism”, focuses on the fort and city architecture of Colombo and Cannanore. Biedermann describes how Colombo had no walls separating certain ethnic and religious groups when compared to Cannanore, which he attributes to the lack of royal regulations about such matters in one case over the other. The seventh chapter, “Change and Resilience under Colonial Rule”, is a wide history on the elephant trade that falls outside the time-frame/theme of the volume and depends heavily on information offered by Dutch sources from the eighteenth century.

Two particular article/chapters pose important arguments for the field of early modern Sri Lankan history: “From Diplomacy to Conquest” (chapter 3) and “Imperial Incorporation” (chapter 5). In these chapters, Biedermann argues that the reason why the Portuguese came to be in a position of authority over the Kingdom of Kotte by the end of the sixteenth century was primarily due to the political and diplomatic pressures of the Portuguese, based in Sri Lanka, rather than any directive issued from the European metropole. It is only from this later point does the Portuguese Crown, now under the more conquest minded Habsburgs, consider conquering the entire island. In this way, Biedermann wants us to consider the disjointedness of the Portuguese overseas empire as well as the importance of the “local”.

When examining the details of Biedermann’s arguments one finds that he poses a type of theoretical argument which draws on theories of Buddhist kingship. He explains that local Portuguese actors could diplomatically wrangle political authority away from the Kotte kings because of culturally commensurate notions of sovereignty in the Portuguese and Kottean traditions (i.e., they used commonly recognized arrangements of vassalage and tribute agreements). Thus, the notion of Buddhist kingship, cakravarti, is judged by Biedermann to be culturally commensurate with notions of kingship in the Catholic tradition (34). This fact also impacts expansion since Biedermann finds, in the cakravarti concept, a legitimate mandate of imperial control over the entire island from which the Portuguese are said to have built their own legal precedent of conquest (41-3).

Biedermann explains that this theoretical intervention on Portuguese-Kottean “commensurablity” is highly influenced by the work of Sanjay Subrahmanyam.Footnote ³ However, when examining the arguments put forward in Subrahmanyam, one finds him to be arguing against the manner in which Biedermann frames commensurability: for example, when Subrahmanyam surveys the different interpretations offered on the subject of English and Mughal Indian commensurability from the account of the failed embassy of Thomas Roe to Jahangir’s court in the 1610s. Subrahmanyam does not promote detailing large cultural systems defined by the “encounter” between the disparate West and East.Footnote ⁴ In the specific case of Roe, Subrahmanyam finds Roe’s depiction of Mughal despotism to be a reflection of his have given up on the embassy, which failed due to there not being a common language for communication and no corresponding translators to communicate on a basic level. In light of this fact and as a means of connecting back to Biedermann’s work, Subrahmanyam’s reading of the diplomatic interactions between the Portuguese and the Kotte Kings would not be concerned with sketching out larger cultural systems, instead it would underscore the more immediate reason why Kotte kept diplomatic relations with the Portuguese throughout the sixteenth century (i.e., for the simple fact that the Kotte Kings needed Portuguese military support for defence against their rivals’ continual military incursions [51-52]).

Ultimately, Biedermann’s volume does not demonstrate South Asian regional history. Rather it reproduces an approach that assumes European sources can only speak for the history of European expansion in Asia and falls back on studies of “Buddhist Kingship” to fill in the regional dimension. In this sense, Biedermann’s book shares a common approach with many other works on Sri Lanka that cover the period in question. Thus for the historian interested in regional island history, the book would have been more helpful if it did not fall back on constructing disparate cultural systems between Europeans and Asians that were religious in nature, an all too common approach in the extant literature.