Maritime Sri Lanka: Historical And Contemporary Perspectives

Maritime Sri Lanka: Historical And Contemporary Perspectives

Author: Chulanee Attanayake

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2021-01-18

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 9811222053

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Being an island nation, the ocean is never too far from Sri Lanka. Situated right at the center of the world's busiest sea lanes of communication, the geography connects the country with the Indian Ocean, and its destiny is linked to this strategic body of water. For centuries, the Indian Ocean has been part of Sri Lanka's strategic, security, and political narratives. However, over the years, the country's involvement in the affairs of the Indian Ocean has retracted due to domestic and regional circumstances. Its consciousness of its ocean identity declined when it took an inward orientation which gave greater visibility to its South Asian identity, and its own imagination began to pivot towards the Indian hinterland. However, with the rising importance of the Indian Ocean in geopolitics, and with the end of the civil war, Sri Lanka's consciousness of its ocean identity has grown. Successive governments have formulated policies that would have paved its way to become the hub of the Indian Ocean, making the ocean the center of its economic development, maritime security, and defense relations. Amidst this backdrop, this book explores historical and contemporary perspectives on Sri Lanka's relations with the Indian Ocean.


Islanded

Islanded

Author: Sujit Sivasundaram

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-08-05

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 022603836X

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How did the British come to conquer South Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Answers to this question usually start in northern India, neglecting the dramatic events that marked Britain’s contemporaneous subjugation of the island of Sri Lanka. In Islanded, Sujit Sivasundaram reconsiders the arrival of British rule in South Asia as a dynamic and unfinished process of territorialization and state building, revealing that the British colonial project was framed by the island’s traditions and maritime placement and built in part on the model they provided. Using palm-leaf manuscripts from Sri Lanka to read the official colonial archive, Sivasundaram tells the story of two sets of islanders in combat and collaboration. He explores how the British organized the process of “islanding”: they aimed to create a separable unit of colonial governance and trade in keeping with conceptions of ethnology, culture, and geography. But rather than serving as a radical rupture, he reveals, islanding recycled traditions the British learned from Kandy, a kingdom in the Sri Lankan highlands whose customs—from strategies of war to views of nature—fascinated the British. Picking up a range of unusual themes, from migration, orientalism, and ethnography to botany, medicine, and education, Islanded is an engaging retelling of the advent of British rule.


Maritime Governance And South Asia: Trade, Security And Sustainable Development In The Indian Ocean

Maritime Governance And South Asia: Trade, Security And Sustainable Development In The Indian Ocean

Author: Jivanta Schottli

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2018-03-20

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9813238240

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'The editor has grouped the 15 substantive chapters into one of four themes: order, leadership, institutions, and prospects and perspectives. She succinctly expresses the unifying challenge within the region as one of managing rapid growth but also confronting its vulnerability. There is much of value in this volume …'Journal of the Indian Ocean RegionFive out of the eight South Asian countries have direct access to the Indian ocean, yet research tends to focus instead on the region's landmass. Much less attention is paid to the extensive maritime space that links South Asian countries, provides their populations with vital access to resources, connects their economies to global trade networks and perhaps most importantly, contributes to law and order at sea.At a time when the Indian Ocean has gained great interest and relevance for many global actors, the role and location of South Asia will have critical implications for strategic calculation and alignment. Furthermore, if trade imbalances are to be tackled and economic globalization to regain steam, enhancing South Asia's ability to export and import through the oceans is essential. Finally, climate change is projected to impact South Asia massively. Coping with humanitarian crises and natural disasters will need critical investments in maritime capacities and cooperation.This edited volume brings together multiple perspectives on contemporary maritime governance in South Asia, from practitioners, policy-makers and academics around the world. They examine India's role as South Asia's leading naval and economic power and the capacity of key actors to shape maritime order in the Indian Ocean.


Ships and the Development of Maritime Technology on the Indian Ocean

Ships and the Development of Maritime Technology on the Indian Ocean

Author: Ruth Barnes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-12-22

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 1317793439

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Recognising the fundamental role both of shipping communities and the technologies crafted and shared by them, this book explores the types of ships, methods of navigation and modes of water-borne trade in the Indian Ocean region and the way they affected the development of distinctive settlements against a changing but strong sense of regional consciousness and identity.


Maritime Safety and Security in the Indian Ocean

Maritime Safety and Security in the Indian Ocean

Author: Vijay Sakhuja

Publisher: Vij Books India

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 127

ISBN-13: 9789385563782

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This book provides a comprehensive view of the maritime safety and security challenges in countries of the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA). Various issues such as trans-national crime including piracy, terrorism, drug and arms smuggling; Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HA/DR) and maritime and aeronautical Search and Rescue (SAR); Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing and resource management for sustainable development are viewed from the perspectives of IORA members. It also discusses the role of cooperative organizational structures and the need for capability building and capacity optimization in the light of existing legal frameworks for enhancing maritime safety and security in the Indian Ocean.


Slave in a Palanquin

Slave in a Palanquin

Author: Nira Wickramasinghe

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-11-17

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 0231552262

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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. She tells the stories of Wayreven, the slave who traveled in the palanquin of his master; Selestina, accused of killing her child; Rawothan, who sought permission for his son to be circumcised; and others, enslaved or emancipated, who challenged their status. Drawing on legal cases, petitions, and other colonial records to recover individual voices and quotidian moments, Wickramasinghe offers a meditation on the archive of slavery. She examines how color-based racial thinking gave way to more nuanced debates about identity, complicating conceptions of blackness and racialization. A deeply interdisciplinary book with a focus on recovering subaltern resistance, Slave in a Palanquin offers a vital new portrait of the local and transnational worlds of the colonial-era Asian slave trade in the Indian Ocean.


Taprobanê

Taprobanê

Author: D. P. M. Weerakkody

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13:

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The author brings together the references to Sri Lanka (the island of Taprobane in Greek and Latin texts) for the purpose of examining their value as sources for the study of ancient Sri Lanka. One of the main reasons for Sri Lanka to maintain political, religious and commercial relationships with the external world was its role as a great emporium in the long distance maritime trade, a result of its central position in the Indian Ocean, its numerous bays and harbours facilitating both sea-borne and inland trade and its holdings of high export value goods such as precious stones, textiles and spices. Any study of this commerce has to be based on literary and epigraphical sources on the one hand and archaeological evidence on the other. The range of the volume is vast and includes not only a critical assessment of all the notices by classical writers on Taprobane (the author provides an up to date analysis), but also a chapter on Roman coins found in Sri Lanka and a chapter on alleged classical references in the interlinear inscriptions from Sri Lanka, which questions their genuineness. Through this book we have a recourse to a work of reference for any study on ancient Sri Lanka and its important position in the world of the Indian Ocean.