For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover  for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India  Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade.  Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the  British conquered the island in the late eighteenth century and began to  gradually abolish slavery. Yet the continued presence of enslaved  people in Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century has practically vanished  from collective memory in both the Sinhalese and Tamil communities.

Nira  Wickramasinghe uncovers the traces of slavery in the history and memory  of the Indian Ocean world, exploring moments of revolt in the lives of  enslaved people in the wake of abolition. 

 Sri Lanka in the Modern Age recounts the modern history of  the island in an accessible yet unconventional manner. Where other  histories have tended to focus on the state’s failure to accommodate the  needs and demands of minority communities, Wickramasinghe places their  claims alongside the political, social and economic demands of other  communities, parties, associations and groups, tracing their lineages to  the colonial period. This updated second edition carries the book into  the present, covering the brutal end of Sri Lanka’s civil war and the  making of oppressive stability that has grown in its wake.

Drawing on recent work as well as on her own research in the field,  Wickramasinghe has written above all a history of the people of Sri  Lanka rather than a history of the nation-state.

Everyday life in the Crown colony of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was  characterized by a direct encounter of people with modernity through the  consumption and use of foreign machines – in particular, the Singer  sewing machine, but also the gramophone, tramway, bicycle and varieties  of industrial equipment. The ‘metallic modern’ of the 19th and early  20th century Ceylon encompassed multiple worlds of belonging and  imagination; and enabled diverse conceptions of time to coexist through  encounters with Siam, the United States and Japan as well as a new  conception of urban space in Colombo. Metallic Modern describes  the modern as it was lived and experienced by non-elite groups –  tailors, seamstresses, shopkeepers, workers – and suggests that their  idea of the modern was nurtured by a changing material world. 

Dressing the Colonised Body explores  popular, political and symbolic meanings assigned to dress in a variety  of colonial contexts in Sri Lanka; thus it focuses on the politics of  nationalism and identity under late colonialism.

 Proceeding from  the understanding that self-representation is at its peak at the moment  of political independence, the author examines the lineages that exist  between that moment in Sri Lanka and the colonial past, as also the  meaning of the commemorations that took place on Independence Day. She  examines changes at the material level—in the production and consumption  of cloth and the advent of the sewing machine—and the construction of  ‘authenticity’ and ‘identity’ through the creation, by the colonial  government, of official costumes. Simultaneously she attempts to  recreate the life of one man though a study of his dress as revealed in  photographs.

 Well researched and highly creative, this book is  an important addition to the growing literature on the social history of  South Asia.  

This important book explores the various ways in which new  international and transnational forces--especially multilateral  financial agencies, humanitarian relief organizations, and northern  NGOs--are shaping the development state in Sri Lanka. The new circles of  power that are being drawn by them are playing a substantial role not  only in reorganizing the political economy of the country, but also in  integrating it into a new cultural and ideological order through the  creation of transnational networks. Presenting a view from the `South`on  global society, this insightful book presents a critical yet  sympathetic examination of the new forces that are shaping societies in  developing countries.

 This Book Is A Very Important Work Of Scholarship And Research Because  It Sheds Fresh Light On Some Of The Historical Roots Of Present-Day Sri  Lankan Ethnic Politics Through An Examination Of The Last Decades Of  Colonial Ceylon.