Matale Rebellion

The Matale rebellion, also known as the Rebellion of 1848, took place in Ceylon against the British colonial government under Governor Lord Torrington, 7th Viscount Torrington. It marked a transition from the classic feudal form of anti-colonial revolt to modern independence struggles. It was fundamentally a peasant revolt.

The Kandyan provinces were in a state of turmoil. They had been under British rule for 32 years. Under the wastelands ordinance, the British had expropriated the common land of the peasantry and reduced them to penury. In the 1830s, coffee was introduced into Ceylon, a crop which flourishes in high altitudes, and grown on the land taken from the peasants. The principal impetus to this development was the decline in coffee production in the West Indies, following the abolition of slavery there.

However, the dispossessed peasantry were not employed on the plantations: The Kandyan villagers refused to abandon their traditional subsistence holdings and become wage-workers in the nightmarish conditions that prevailed on these new estates, despite all the pressure exerted by the colonial state. The British therefore had to draw on its reserve army of labour in India, to man its lucrative new outpost to the south. An infamous system of contract labour was established, which transported hundreds of thousands of Tamil 'coolies' from southern India into Sri Lanka for the coffee estates. These Tamils labourers died in tens of thousands both on the journey itself as well as on the plantations.

An economic depression in the United Kingdom had severely affected the local coffee and cinnamon industry. Planters and merchants clamoured for a reduction of export duties. Sir James Emerson Tennent, the Colonial Secretary in Colombo recommended to Earl Grey, Secretary of State for the Colonies in London that taxation should be radically shifted from indirect taxation to direct taxation, which proposal was accepted. It was decided to abolish the export duty on coffee and reduce the export duty on cinnamon leaving a deficit of £40,000 Sterling which was to be met by direct taxes on the people. A new Governor, 35-year-old Lord Torrington, a cousin of Prime Minister Lord Russell was dispatched to Colombo by Queen Victoria to carry out these reforms.

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