From Sovereignty to Modernity: Revisiting the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms - Transforming the Buddhist and Colonial Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Ceylon

Abstract

The 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 tha..