British Ceylon

British Ceylon was the crown colony of the island now called Sri Lanka, held by Britain from the seizure of the Dutch coast in 1796 and over the whole island from the fall of Kandy in 1815 until independence in February 1948. A governor at Colombo ruled through district agents, while coffee and then tea estates remade the highlands with Tamil labour, railways climbed to Kandy, and the harbour fortified the Indian Ocean route. The colony became the model of paternal administration: malaria campaigns, universal schooling, and a slow widening of the franchise that trained the very elite who would dismantle it. The 1915 riots, the Donoughmore constitution and the war years ripened the demand for self-rule. On 4 February 1948 the Union Jack came down for the Dominion of Ceylon, which kept the link to the crown until the republic of Sri Lanka in 1972. Colombo's fort, Galle Face Green and the hill-country railways still carry the colonial imprint today.