Discussion of Sujit Sivasundaram's Islanded

WISER and CISA invite you to join us for a discussion between Sujit Sivasundaram, Isabel Hofmeyr and Dilip Menon of Sivasundaram's new book Islanded:  Britain, Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase.

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.