Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the colonial registration of people and land in Ceylon/Sri Lanka from the perspectives of cultural/colonial history and demographic methodology

Paper long abstract:

In 2003 UNESCO declared the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archive world heritage because 'it is the most complete and extensive source on early modern world history'. Our paper aims at investigating and contextualizing one of the most unique records within the entire VOC collection: the eighteenth century thombos or cadastral and census registers of Southwest Sri Lanka, in uniqueness only comparable to the Domesday Book. These records, contained in 568 bundles in the Sri Lanka National Archives, provide us with detailed population data from the early modern tropical world and await structural analysis.

The Dutch thombos are the culmination of Portuguese, indigenous and Dutch administrative practices. Well into the 20th century extracts from the thombos were used in court to claim landownership. The importance of the thombos for Sri Lanka's history is widely acknowledged and they carry the potential for extensive and detailed research into rural life in Sri Lanka in the 18th century. It allows for thematic research into historical demography and family composition, the island's migration history and colonial knowledge formation. However, the thombos are complicated records and working with these records requires ethnographic knowledge of Sinhalese society, Sri Lankan geography and Dutch bureaucracy.

Our paper addresses the following questions:

(1) Why were these records kept?

(2) Who produced them and under what circumstances?

(3) What data can be extracted from the records? (e.g. ethnic and caste composition of the population and migration)

We will also demonstrate innovative methods to reconstruct fertility using colonial census data.