In 1658 he managed to drive them off the island, and the Dutch then gradu-ally took over the south of the island, then the south-west and south-western coast.. By 1765 the Dutch were in
Trang 1island He saw that this would provide an important
counterbalance to the Portuguese
The fi rst Dutch settlement was established in 1640
with William Jacobszoon Coster as the governor In June
1640 Coster was murdered and replaced by Jan
Thys-sen Payart, who had started establishing farms to grow
cinnamon for export to Europe It was the fi fth
gover-nor, Adriaan van der Meijden, who decided to move
decisively against the Portuguese In 1658 he managed
to drive them off the island, and the Dutch then
gradu-ally took over the south of the island, then the
south-west and south-western coast When they took over the entire
east coast of the island in 1665, even though Kandy
remained independent, they controlled all the ports By
1765 the Dutch were in control of the entire coastline,
and Kandy only held the isolated highlands in the center
of the island that were too diffi cult to attack
Offi cially the island was a possession of the Dutch
East India Company, and it appointed a governor based
in Colombo who ruled Ceylon as a colony Most
gov-ernors were only in Ceylon for short periods, but some
had a lasting effect on the place Jan Maetsuyker,
gover-nor from 1646 until 1650—before the Dutch took
con-trol of the whole island—relaxed laws on mixed
mar-riages to try to encourage Dutch merchants to marry,
assimilate, and remain on the island He felt that this
might allow them to compete with local merchants on
a much stronger basis
In contrast, Jacob van Kittensteijn, his
succes-sor from 1650 until 1653, regarded the local wives of
merchants as being “vicious and immoral.” The
situa-tion changed again after the capture of Colombo and
Jaffna in 1656–58 with some 200 Dutch soldiers and
merchants marrying into the Indo-Portuguese
commu-nity—many of these being the wives of Portuguese who
were unceremoniously deported Rijklof van Goens,
one of the longest serving governors (who had
cap-tured Jaffna), governed 1662–63 and again 1665–75
He encouraged mixed marriages—or indeed any
mar-riages—to try to build up an indigenous Dutch settler
population However, he legislated that daughters of
mixed marriages should marry Dutchmen This had
the result of ensuring that there were large numbers of
people on the island with Dutch surnames
Rijklof van Goens was succeeded as governor by his
son and then by Laurens Pijl from 1679 until 1692 These
three governors provided much stability for the
colo-nial infrastructure of the island, which was divided into
three parts: Colombo, Galle, and Jaffna The latter two
parts had commanders who reported to the governor,
whereas the governor ruled the area around Colombo
himself, with the assistance of a small nominated coun-cil Lower levels of the bureaucracy were staffed by Sin-halese or Tamils who originated from southern India The Sinhalese nobility kept their privileges, and, with
no worry of invasion or civil war, they actually consid-erably increased their wealth
The Dutch recognized Portuguese land titles (in contrast to their actions in Malacca and elsewhere), and they widened the private ownership of land, which for the Portuguese had only operated in urban areas This resulted in the massive settlement of fertile land, with Dutch and largely Sinhalese businessmen and farmers being able to establish considerable land holdings There were attempts to codify the local laws, but this proved much more complicated than
expect-ed The result was that Dutch laws gradually came to apply to the cities and much of the coastal regions, especially in areas dominated by the Sinhalese Mus-lim laws applied to MusMus-lims on the east coast, and the Thesawalamai laws used by the Tamils of Jaffna were codifi ed in 1707 and used there, although Christians there were subject to Dutch laws
RELIGION
In the area of religion, when the Dutch took Ceylon there were, nominally, about 250,000 Sinhalese and Tamil Roman Catholics, a quarter of these from the region around Jaffna The Dutch banned Roman Catholicism, ejected all Catholic priests, and made it illegal for any
to operate on the island They also set about converting many of the local people to Calvinism Roman Catho-lic churches were changed into Reformed churches, and many Catholics converted to Calvinism in name only, while others reverted to Hinduism or Buddhism How-ever, a shortage of Dutch ministers held up these plans, and Roman Catholics operated underground, especially from the Portuguese-held port of Goa, in India
Although the Portuguese had made much revenue from Ceylon, the Dutch set about methodically expand-ing the revenue base of the country The Portuguese had relied heavily on tariffs and obligatory labor for a cer-tain number of days each year by the poor (in lieu of taxes); the Dutch maintained these but started estab-lishing large plantations for cinnamon, which rapidly became the mainstay of the Dutch colonial economic structure in Ceylon
The Dutch East India Company maintained a mo-nopoly not only over the export of cinnamon but also over areca nuts, pearls, and elephants They were par-ticularly anxious to control the Ceylon economy tightly, and imports from India were so heavily restricted that
82 Ceylon: Dutch to British colony