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Edited History and Timeline
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==Timeline== | ==Timeline== | ||
1517 - The Portuguese built a fort at the port city of Colombo and gradually extended their control over the coastal areas<br> | 1517 - The Portuguese built a fort at the port city of Colombo and gradually extended their control over the coastal areas<br> | ||
1638 - The king signed a treaty with the Dutch East India Company to get rid of the Portuguese who ruled most of the coastal areas<br> | |||
1796 - Great Britain occupied the coastal areas of the island, which they called Ceylon, with little difficulty<br> | |||
1830's - The British had to draw on its reserve army of labor in India, to man its lucrative new outpost to the south. An infamous system of contract labor was established, which transported hundreds of thousands of Tamil coolies from southern India into Sri Lanka for the coffee estates. These Tamils laborers died in tens of thousands both on the journey itself as well as on the plantations<br> | |||
1833 - New leaders represented the various ethnic groups of the population in the Ceylon Legislative Council on a communal basis. Buddhist and Hindu revivalism reacted against Christian missionaries<br> | |||
1948 - The Soulbury constitution ushered in Dominion status, with independence proclaimed<br> | |||
1956 - Sinhala Only Act, recognized Sinhala as the only official language of the government. Although partially reversed in 1958, the bill posed a grave concern for the Tamil community, which perceived in it a threat to their language and culture<br> | |||
1983 - Anti-Tamil race riots, allegedly backed by Sinhalese hard-line ministers, which resulted in more than 150,000 Tamil civilians fleeing the island, seeking asylum in other countries<br> | |||
2004 - Asian tsunami killed over 35,000 in Sri Lanka<br> | |||
==External Links== | ==External Links== | ||
*[http://vedda.org/obeyesekere2.htm Colonial Histories and Vädda Primitivism] | *[http://vedda.org/obeyesekere2.htm Colonial Histories and Vädda Primitivism] | ||