Periodization of Sri Lanka history: The first Europeans to visit Ceylon in modern times were the Portuguese: Lourenço de Almeida arrived in 1505, finding the island divided into seven warring kingdoms and unable to fend off intruders.

The island attracted the attention of the newly formed Dutch Republic when they were invited by the Sinhalese King to fight the Portuguese.

In the late 18th century the Dutch, weakened by their wars against Great Britain, were conquered by Napoleonic France, and their leaders became refugees in London.

The king, who was of South Indian ancestry, faced powerful chieftains and sought cruel measures to repress their popularity with the people.

It took the ruling families of Kandy less than two years to realise that the authority of the British government was a fundamentally different one to that of the (deposed) Nayakkar dynasty.

The main cause of the rebellion was the British authorities' failure to protect and uphold the customary Buddhist traditions, which were viewed by the islanders as an integral part of their lives.

However it was the last uprising of this kind and in the Uva Province a scorched earth policy was pursued, and all males between 15 and 60 years were driven out, exiled and killed.

To work the estates, the planters imported large numbers of Tamil workers as indentured labourers from south India, who soon made up 10% of the island's population.

The British colonial government favoured the semi-European Burghers, certain high-caste Sinhalese and the Tamils who were mainly concentrated to the north of the country while ignoring the other ethnic groups on the island.

Universal suffrage was introduced in 1931, over the protests of the Sinhalese, Tamil and Burgher elite who objected to the common people being allowed to vote.

They used local informants and British surveyors to map the island, and then built a network of roads to open the central region.

The spice was extremely valuable, and the British East India Company began to cultivate it in 1767, but Ceylon remained the main producer until the end of the 18th century[20] The laying of the railway was carried out during the Governorship of Sir Henry Ward.

Other major works of the British include road-building projects and the establishment of coffee and tea plantations, hospitals, and maternity homes.

Prof. K. M. de Silva, the famous Peradeniya historian has pointed out that the refusal of the Ceylon Tamils to accept minority status to be one of the main causes which broke up the CNC.

[21][22] The Marxist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), which grew out of the Youth Leagues in 1935, made the demand for outright independence a cornerstone of their policy.

The concerted (but ineffective) attempts to rouse the public against the British Raj in revolt would have led to certain bloodshed and a delay in independence.

British state papers released in the 1950s show that the Marxist movement had a very negative impact on the policy makers at the Colonial office.

[22] The close collaboration of the D. S. Senanayake government with the war-time British administration led to the support of Lord Louis Mountbatten.

The movement in Ceylon was minuscule, limited to the English educated intelligentsia and trade unions, mainly in the urban centres.

Ceylon became crucial to the British Empire in the war, with Lord Louis Mountbatten using Colombo as his headquarters for the Eastern Theater.

Meanwhile, the Marxists, identifying the war as a sideshow between rival empires and desiring a proletarian revolution, chose a path of agitation disproportionate to their negligible combat strength and diametrically opposed to the "constitutionalist" approach of Senanayake and other Ethnic Sinhalese leaders.

The Sinhalese leader Don Stephen Senanayake left the CNC on the issue of independence, disagreeing with the revised aim of 'the achieving of freedom', although his real reasons were more subtle.

[27] He subsequently formed the United National Party (UNP) in 1946,[28] when a new constitution was agreed on, based on the behind-the-curtain lobbying of the Soulbury Commission.

At the elections of 1947, the UNP won a minority of the seats in Parliament but cobbled together a coalition with the Sinhala Maha Sabha of Solomon Bandaranaike and the Tamil Congress of G.G.

The successful inclusions of the Tamil-communalist leader Ponnambalam, and his Sinhala counterpart Bandaranaike were a remarkable political balancing act by Senanayake.

The multiracial population of Ceylon was numerous enough to support the European colonists; the Portuguese and the Dutch offspring of the past 440 odd years of colonial history was large enough to run a stable government.

This was replaced by the Soulbury Commission proposals that led to the Dominion of Ceylon of 1948–1972, after which the Free, Sovereign and the Independent Republic of Sri Lanka was established.

[32] Trincomalee Harbour was an important strategic base for the British Royal Navy until 1948, primarily to control the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean.