On solid ground? Manumitted slaves, land ownership and registration in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT

In pre-industrial societies subsistence agriculture played a crucial role in ensuring survival, not just for people born free, but also for those born into slavery. Within the legal framework of colonial structures, certain owners granted their enslaved individuals temporary usage rights to parcels of land upon their emancipation, and in rare cases, even bestowed permanent ownership. This article wants to study land ownership patterns of manumitted slaves in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka, when the island’s coastal territories were subject to the influence of the Dutch East India Company. By examining Dutch-language last wills from the period 1702 to 1765 we analyze the patterns of land donations by former owners to their freed slaves. By establishing connections between these donations and the detailed land registers of suburban districts surrounding the cities of Colombo and Galle, our objective is to uncover the shortand long-term implications of land ownership for the manumitted individuals and their families. Furthermore, this article also reflects on the implications of negotiated registration practices of such land ownership with a colonial power for the manumitted slaves. What did the label ‘manumitted’ or ‘free’ slave entail in Sri Lanka’s society, and how did registration in Dutch bureaucracy influence those labelling practices?

KEYWORDS:

• Slavery
• manumission
• 18th century
• Sri Lanka

1. Introduction

In the last couple of years, historical slavery research has shown a general tendency to shift attention away from the dynamics of the slave trade and the lived experiences of enslaved people towards the so-called ‘afterlife’ of slavery (Hartman, 2007). How people achieved and experienced the transition from slavery to freedom had profound consequences for themselves and their descendants¹ Past experiences of enslavement influenced future life choices and possibilities. Studying the continued effects of slavery on later generations also directly feeds into reigning debates in the contemporary public sphere on how to deal with the lasting structural inequalities of historical slave trade (e.g. Fatah-Black, 2021).

From the early nineteenth century onwards, the centuries-old international slave trade was gradually outlawed, although in the Atlantic space the intra-American slave trade remained legal for much longer. Not surprisingly, these prohibitions of slave trade and the ensuing abolition movements are considered self-evident cut-off points for most new histories of post-slavery. With the final abolishment of slavery in (most of) the British and the French empires in 1833 and 1848 respectively, and the Dutch overseas territories around 1860, European states bought enslaved people from the colonists, thereby formally freeing them (although many freed people were often forced into new coerced labor regimes). Other parts of the world would witness similar phenomena later in the nineteenth century; Brazil, for example, enacted the Free Womb Law in 1871 and saw formal abolition in 1888 (Rosa, 2020). Despite the natural choice for these nineteenth-century caesurae for a lot of post-slavery histories, it runs the risk of reducing earlier struggles for and obtaining of individual freedom from slavery to mere preludes of the general abolitionist waves that came ashore from the second quarter of the nineteenth century onwards.

This contribution wants to explore opportunities for studying the afterlife of slavery before abolition, utilizing the archives left by Dutch colonial bureaucracies in Asia, both those directly related to the institutionalized selling, buying and manumitting of enslaved as well as broader registration systems of people, land and labor. Simultaneously, the article wants to reflect on underlying registration practices in early modern colonial institutions. Rather than generalized abolition acts, individual manumission deeds are considered here as the starting point of a life after enslavement. With such deeds, owners could grant enslaved individuals in their ownership freedom in the centuries before the end of the slave system. Rather than a standard practice, manumission was limited to the lucky few, and the result of a long-standing relationship between the owner and the enslaved. Manumission was not necessarily the end point of that master–slave relationship but often a shift in existing dynamics, as contractual obligations, monetary debt, godparentship or continued work relations could outlive a slave status. As a first proxy to study the impact of past enslavement on future life opportunities, the prism of land ownership will be employed. Were former slaves after their emancipation able to acquire property, and, if so, in what ways? And moreover, what did the – sometimes temporary – ownership entail for them and their families, as stepping stones in their afterlife of slavery? And finally, on a more abstract level, what did negotiated registration practices of that land ownership with a colonial power mean for manumitted slaves and their families?

In a quest for answers we turn to the extensive administration of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie [VOC]) in colonial Asia in general and of the coastal territories of the remarkably cosmopolitan (Biedermann & Strathern, 2017) island of Sri Lanka in particular. Situated at the heart of the Indian Ocean world, Sri Lanka had for centuries attracted groups of traders, conquerors, migrants and travelers from the Arabian peninsula, the Indian subcontinent and from further into South East Asia. With the continued presence of Portuguese merchants and soldiers from the turn of the sixteenth century onwards, these various influences would continue to shape the island’s society and culture, resulting in a rich tapestry of languages, religions and ethnicities (Wickramasinghe, 2015). Against this backdrop, the VOC arrived in the early seventeenth century, driven by the pursuit of wealth, particularly in cinnamon, which until then had been monopolized by the Portuguese settlements on the island. Following systematic conquests of Portuguese forts and outposts and aligning with the local kingdom of Kandy against the common Iberian enemy, the VOC established its own colonial administration in the coastal regions of Sri Lanka from the mid-seventeenth century onwards (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Map of Sri Lanka, 1766–1796, by © Thijs Hermsen (Humanities lab, Faculty of Arts, Radboud University).

These extensive Dutch bureaucracies left us with a fascinating source to study land ownership patterns of manumitted slaves, and the underlying registration practices. Building on existing precolonial and Portuguese systems, ensuing governors after the Dutch take-over in 1658 attempted to make the inhabitants and land under their (relative) control more or less ‘legible’. Such legibility proved essential in their quest for successful and efficient extraction of resources, but especially labor and caste-based services (Bulten, 2022; Dewasiri, 2008). The so-called thombo registers are therefore the result of successive efforts throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to record all inhabitants and their land in the coastal regions under Dutch rule, leaving researchers with hundreds of thousands of entries on individuals, their families and properties in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka.² In the thombo administration, families and property were recorded in great detail, with demographic and genealogical details of all family members (name, age, occupation/service, caste and religion) as well as the families’ landed properties, including fruit-bearing trees and rice fields, alongside a concise narrative tracing the lineage of these properties within the families.

While in the past decade the research possibilities of these registers to answer socio-economic and demographic questions have slowly but surely been unearthed (e.g. Bulten et al., 2018; Drixler & Kok, 2013; Kok, 2020; Kok & Van den Belt, 2013; Lyna & Bulten, 2021),³ up until now they have not been tapped into as a possible source for slavery research, with the exception of an exploratory Dutch graduate thesis (De Mars, 2020). This article will assess the analytical value of these thombo registers for studying future lives of past enslaved through the prism of land ownership. In the first section we will offer a short historical introduction to forms of pre-colonial and European-imported systems of slavery on Sri Lanka and legal manumission under the Roman-Dutch framework as a means to acquire freedom. What opportunities – if any – did manumission offer for enslaved individuals, and what conditions were usually set to achieve this new legal status? In the second part, two sets of thombo registers will be analyzed to understand the limited access that manumitted slaves had to the land market, and to discern possible patterns of land ownership within this group. What was the relative importance of this plot of land for the manumitted slave and his/her dependents? Towards that end the focused 1766 thombo registers of the Colombo suburbs will be combined with those of over 200 villages in the entire Galle province, drawn up between 1742 and 1784 (Figure 2). In the third and final segment we will reflect on the registration of manumitted slaves in these thombos, and draw them on a larger bureaucratic canvas. What did the label ‘manumitted’ or ‘free’ slave entail in Sri Lanka’s society, and how did registration in Dutch bureaucracy influence those labelling practices?

Figure 2. Map of Sri Lanka, 1766–1796, detail of southwestern Colombo and Galle provinces by © Thijs Hermsen (Humanities Lab, Faculty of Arts, Radboud University).

2. Slavery and manumission in Dutch Sri Lanka

In Sri Lankan historiography the subjects of slavery and abolition received little attention compared to the more frequent social histories of caste (Wickramasinghe, 2020; Wickramasinghe & Schrikker, 2019). But we know that at least from the Portuguese period onwards enslaved people were imported into Sri Lanka, and that the island became an important node in the Dutch slave trade in the Indian Ocean World of the late seventeenth century (Mbeki & Van Rossum, 2017; Ward, 2009). The limited census material indicates that around the turn of the eighteenth century over half of the urban population of the island were enslaved individuals; in and around the city of Colombo alone, there were already more than 1750 individuals of African and Asian descent living in enslavement (Knaap, 1981; Raben, 1996).

Alongside this imported European slavery system there existed various forms of social bondage on Sri Lanka, such as debt bondage and the selling/pawning of children (Schrikker & Ekama, 2017). Sinhalese, Chettiyar, Moorish and other communities in the coastal territories continued these bondage practices during larger parts of the Dutch period. These local notions of slavery with their varying degrees of (un)freedom and the ability to move in and out of slavery not surprisingly clashed with the Dutch slave code. After all, the latter promulgated an absolute Justinian concept of slavery and freedom, where enslaved people had no personal rights and were an item of property for their masters. Over time, a more or less pragmatic Dutch approach eventually resulted in a fragmented policy in the coastal territories under their rule, with structural attempts to outlaw local forms of slavery in the southwestern part, while at the same time acknowledging the existence of so-called ‘slave castes’ in the northern province of Jaffna (Balmforth, 2020; Schrikker & Ekama, 2017).

The imported Roman-Dutch legal system offered enslaved individuals the chance to leave their slave past behind them in a legally recognized procedure via manumission deeds.⁴ Shortly after the installment of civil institutions by the VOC in the mid-seventeenth century, enslaved people gained their freedom via these documents. However, local governments wanted to prevent these individuals to be dependent on poor relief, and in 1682 ordered that slaveowners had to vouch for the costs of the freed individual’s livelihood for a period of six years after manumission. In 1765 this ordinance was updated to a mandatory payment of 10 rijksdaalders upon manumission to the local charity boards of the Dutch Reformed Church, institutions that looked after the deserving poor in these colonial outposts and settlements (Rose, 2023).

Preliminary research on a set of eighteenth-century manumission deeds for Colombo reveals that emancipation was granted as a reward for long-standing loyal service, but also that enslaved individuals could buy their own freedom after financially compensating their owner.⁵ Moreover, anecdotical examples showcase that emancipated slaves in turn released other enslaved people from their status and helped them on their way to freedom in a process of ‘chain manumission’.⁶ Since the archive of manumission deeds is not complete for the eighteenth century, last wills drawn up for the Colombo area offer complementary evidence. Based on those last wills, every year an average of 21 enslaved were promised manumission. Although the precise relationship between promised freedom in last wills and actual manumission rates still needs to be determined, between 1700 and 1766 (the years the used Colombo thombo registers were drawn up) an estimated 1250 to 1500 privately owned slaves likely obtained their legal freedom in and around Colombo.⁷

As we lack structural sources to study continuing post-slavery effects, it remains very unclear what happened afterwards to these individuals and their families in Sri Lanka. But that the societal outlook on this rather heterogenous group was not particularly welcoming becomes clear from a letter sent by Governor Simons in 1705. In this document he condescendingly describes the island’s migrant group of Tamil-speaking Chettiyars from South India as ‘coagulated from a party of manumitted private slaves and as other vile people’ (Raben, 1996, p. 267). In line with such generalizing statements from governors and higher Dutch officials, the historiographical topos prevails that manumitted slaves merged into the growing anonymous underbelly of (sub)urban societies of colonial Sri Lanka. Raben, for example, claims that all freed slaves ‘after manumission joined the large amorphous mass of freed slaves, retaining only vague allegiances towards their compatriots’ (1996). In more recent years, Schrikker and Ekama echoed that assumption that they were ‘absorbed into the urban underclasses as many manumitted individuals had been over the previous centuries’ (2017, p. 181). Nevertheless, the thombo registration does offer us some snapshots for the eighteenth century, when manumitted slaves, families and their land enter the picture.

3. Manumitted slaves and access to the land market

But before we turn to their presence in the thombo registration, we need to understand how manumitted slaves could participate in the land market in the first place.⁸ Secondary literature foregrounds that the most common way was the owner donating his or her enslaved individual a plot of land, sometimes combining that donation with a sum of money. A preliminary exploration of last wills drawn up in Colombo during the 1720s shows that nearly half of all the enslaved were bequeathed something by their former owner; although the majority of them received only a small sum of money, one out of every eighth enslaved individual was promised a (shared) plot of land.⁹ On average, this implies that every year two manumitted slaves in the greater Colombo area would become landowners; if we extrapolate this number from 1720 up until 1766 when the thombo registers of Colombo’s so-called ‘Four Gravets’ (or suburbs) were drawn up, in theory about 90–100 manumitted slaves should have been registered as (temporary) landholder.¹⁰ However, of the 613 registered landowners scattered across 11 suburban areas and villages in the Colombo Four Gravets, there were only 9 manumitted slaves.

One of them was the free slave woman Dorinda, who lived on a large plot of land in Marendaen, one of Colombo’s suburbs. Dorinda was about 40 years old, born into slavery and brought up as a practicing member of the Dutch Reformed Church in Colombo. She had become full owner of that land two years earlier, when her former mistress widow Simons had passed away with a last will stipulating that property transfer. This full ownership was especially good news for Dorinda’s indwelling son Benjamin and two teenage daughters, Dorothea and Bellisanta, who were all born in freedom and would thus eventually inherit this land after their mother’s death.¹¹ Dorinda also sheltered 25-year-old freed slave Flora, with whom she had served before in the household of widow Simons. Taking a bird’s-eye perspective of Colombo and its suburbs, the donation to Dorinda was the exception rather than the rule. The thombo registers reveal that all the other landowners known to be manumitted slaves in the Colombo suburbs acquired their land after buying it themselves (De Mars, 2020). Even more remarkable is the fact that these eight freed individuals all lived in Kochchikada, one of the more well-to-do suburbs of Colombo. Enslaved people in private ownership could earn some extra money besides their regular labor duties for their master, in exchange for a monthly fee paid to that same owner, the so-called koelij diensten or coolie services (Ekama, 2012). Apparently, this extra income, smaller donations when manumitted or (borrowed) capital from friends and family, allowed several of these freed slaves to become a land owner in the Colombo province.

This exploration of the Colombo suburbs does not rule out that manumitted slaves ventured further inland after gaining freedom and thus escaped the scope of a suburban colonial gaze. Therefore, this 1766 snapshot of the Colombo suburbs was complemented by the thombo registers of about 200 villages in the southern Galle province. Although less of a temporal snapshot than their Colombo counterpart, these Galle registers were drawn up between the early 1740s and mid-1780s and encompass all types of locations from the sprawl next to the fort to suburban villages further away, and to small rural settlements on the border with the Kandyan kingdom some 40 to 50 kilometers away from Galle. But despite this chronological and geographical substantially larger dragnet than the 1766 Colombo suburbs, these registers for the entire Galle province mention ‘only’ 26 household heads who were recorded as manumitted slaves. The majority of them lived in the Galle ‘Four Gravets’, thus supporting the assumption that manumitted slaves mostly lived in suburban areas of large cities on the island, while 15 plots were ‘taken’ by them via homesteading, a common practice in colonial Sri Lanka. By having their homesteaded land registered by the VOC authorities, both parties benefitted; the individuals working the land were recognized as the (temporary) owner, and the colonial government could claim taxes on these lands.

None of these 26 manumitted slaves had been able to buy their property. Compared to the Colombo suburbs, significantly more plots of land in their possession had been granted by their previous owner (49%).¹ But unlike Dorinda and her children who were benefitting from the final nature of the donation, most manumitted slaves were only allowed usufruct of the donated land. In 1747 the freed ‘Moorish’ slave Pauloe, for example, had become the owner of a plot of land in the village of Watterecke (Galle province). But Pauloe did not have the right to purchase the said land, and, if he died without producing an heir, the land would be transferred to the ownership of the Dutch deaconry – overseeing poor relief among others – after he passed away. The issue of Pauloe’s ownership, by the way, was even more complex because he had obtained the land jointly with another freed slave boy named Jantje. However, by 1747, Jantje had already passed away, making Pauloe the sole claimant to conditional ownership.¹² But for all other former slaves who were registered as landowning head of the household in the Galle province, the gifted property would pass to the diaconate immediately after their death. For instance, the freed slave woman Dominga from the outskirts of Galle owned 2 plots in 1746, which had been bequeathed to her 10 years earlier in a will by her master and his wife. However, the thombo registers also mention the additional condition that ‘after her death, these plots of land shall revert to the diaconate of this city.’ It is possible that this condition was added later because Dominga’s master Hendrick Harmens had fallen into poverty and was being supported by the same diaconate for his livelihood.¹³

Although donated land to manumitted slaves was usually temporary, that access to land made a difference not only in their lives and that of their nuclear family. Most of the inhabitants in the coastal territories of Sri Lanka depended to a large extent on the food produce of their own land for their livelihood (Dewasiri, 2008; Kotelawele, 1988). Land ownership could thus be a building block in starting a new life after slavery, not only for manumitted slaves but also for their core and extended family members. In that way, the 38-year-old manumitted slave Ziela in the coastal village of Ahangama (Galle province) in 1753 offered accommodation to his younger brother, his sister (10 years his senior) and her 2 children.¹⁴ With the food produce of his plot of land acquired 16 years earlier via his former owner, Ziela was not only sustaining himself. Especially for his unmarried sister Christina, with her two de jure illegitimate children, this land was a lifeline.

The land (temporarily) owned by manumitted slaves supported in-laws and nieces/nephews too, with even the occasional cousin benefitting from his or her relative’s land as an indweller. In total, these 26 heads of household in the Galle province took care of 103 other individuals, or about 4 other members to each household. The overwhelming majority of these dependents were family members (at least 85%), while some other cases hint at a processes of group emancipation, where manumitted slaves were living on a plot of land with former colleagues.

When manumitted slaves were full owners of a plot of land, that land offered invaluable support for their heirs after their passing. The three children of Dorinda, for example, had that prospect, but in some instances even the following generation reaped the benefits of inheriting property. In the 1760s the 66-year-old widow Suzanna Dias lived in the village of Keselwatta just outside Colombo, on land that used to belong to her former husband, who had been registered as a freed slave boy in the thombos. However, Suzanna did not live alone on that inheritance, but shared love and sorrow with her four sons, four daughters-in-law and no fewer than eight grandchildren on that land.¹⁵

4. Last wills, land registers and underregistration

These combined explorations of the Colombo suburbs in 1766 and the entire Galle province over the course of two generations all in all yielded an unexpectedly low number of manumitted slaves registered as landowners. Extrapolating the average number of 2 manumissions with land gifts in last wills from the 1720s up until 1766, only 1% of the expected 90–100 landowners were found in the thombo registers of the Colombo suburbs. Even considering possible influences that might lower that expected number (e.g. perhaps higher mortality rates among manumitted slaves, outmigration or need to sell land),¹⁶ in the end it does seem as if there is a case of underregistration of property-owning manumitted slaves in the southwestern coastal territories of Dutch Sri Lanka. When digging deeper than merely the nine household heads, that phenomenon becomes even more apparent: the 1766 thombo registers of the Colombo suburbs mention only nine other manumitted slaves as dependents. Using the above-mentioned average of 21 promised manumissions per year, between 1720 and 1766 about 945 enslaved individuals should have received their freedom. So these 18 manumitted slaves (9 landowners and 9 dependents) represent only 0.02% of the expected number of manumitted slaves living in the greater Colombo area.

In order to understand this phenomenon, it might be helpful to consider the concept of recognition, put forward about a decade ago in a seminal volume on historical registration practices (Breckenridge & Szreter, 2012). They argued that any form of registration, albeit censuses, tax lists or even church registers, functions properly and achieves the intended result of the authority installing it when there is something significant in it for the people being registered. Using that concept, we have to therefore wonder what manumitted slaves or their relatives could actually gain by identifying themselves (or being identified) as such in the thombo administration, by referring to their slave ancestry. And the short answer seems to be ‘not a lot’; rather on the contrary. Think back to the negative comment made by Governor Simons back in 1705 as a pars pro toto for the societal outlook as well as that of the colonial government on manumitted slaves in Sri Lankan society, and it is plausible to posit the thesis that (children of) former slaves preferred to discard that label as soon as possible. Similar research on eighteenth-century Dutch Surinam in the Caribbean has shown naming practices of freedmen in an effort to shed the stigma of slavery (Fatah-Black, 2020). Turning the logic of the thombo registration around following the concept of recognition, it might even have been the case that these thombos offered them a valuable opportunity to leave that slave past behind and register themselves and their property as neutral subjects in the here and now, without looking backwards. When combining that insight with the fact that apparently the few landowners referring to themselves as manumitted slaves in the 1766 Colombo suburbs had enough financial leverage to buy their property on the land market, it seems that the agency of these manumitted slaves and their families to carve out their new lives after slavery was considerably higher than we might have expected, based on secondary literature.

Future research into this thombo administration in combination with other sources from the Dutch colonial government should allow us to get a better understanding of this likely process of consciously ‘forgetting’ or ‘erasing’ slave ancestry via means of registration in Sri Lanka.¹⁷ Parish registers from the Dutch Reformed Church, witness testimonies in court cases, and further enquiries of last wills and manumission deeds should allow us to do just that, and at the same time unveil the social networks of manumitted slaves. The anecdotical evidence on the unmarried sister of Ziela, Suzanna’s eight grandchildren and the former colleague and freed slave Flora living with Dorinda seem to confirm the analyses of Newton-King for eighteenth-century Cape Town (Newton-King, 2012) and those of De Koning (in this issue) and Negrón for eighteenth-century Surinam (Negron, 2022) that informal networks both within and outside the family context were crucial for the everyday survival of freed slaves and their dependents. Specifically for the case of Sri Lanka, the question comes to mind of to what extent significant differences in these network opportunities existed for manumitted slaves with private Sinhalese, Tamil, Moorish or Chettiyar owners, when compared with those freed individuals who had been employed by the VOC. These questions beg for an answer, and their soft whispers in Dutch colonial sources will help us to retell the stories of Dorinda, Ziela, Suzanna and their descendants, and that of the afterlife of slavery before abolition in Dutch Asia in general.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This contribution was written in the context of the Dutch Research Council (NWO)- project ‘Forgotten Lineages: Afterlives of Dutch Slavery in the Indian Ocean World’, supervised by Nira Wickramasinghe, a collaboration between Leiden University and Radboud University Nijmegen. The author wishes to thank two anonymous referees, Luc Bulten and Afra de Mars, for their valuable suggestions on earlier drafts of this article, as well as the participants of the Life after Slavery e-workshop in December 2020 and the eponymous online panel at the European Social Science History Conference in March 2021. Vincent Laarman helped me out with processing sample years of the Colombo last wills.

2. Besides the so-called head and land there were also school thombos, akin to parish registers, which will not feature in this article (e.g. De Leede, 2020; De Leede & Rupesinghe, 2023).

3. Sri Lankan scholars have studied these Dutch thombo registers before, resulting in two seminal monographs (Dewasiri, 2008; Paranavitana, 2001).

4. Besides a few small legal provisions, it was especially crucial that at least one individual was a guarantor for the enslaved individual in the first six years after manumission, ensuring that he or she would not have to turn to Dutch poor relief. Sometimes these were former owners or outsiders, or a combination of both (Schrikker & Ekama, 2017). Among them there were a high number of Sinhalese, Chettiyars, soldiers and sailors (Ekama, 2012).

5. The cost of freedom was hardly fixed in colonial Sri Lanka at that time, with variations between barely 30 and up to 250 rixdaalders. This freedom was also conditional for some enslaved people: working for a relative of the deceased owner was a common feature, and only after this service would the enslaved person be granted his or her formal freedom. Thus, their legal status might have changed somewhat after the last will, but in everyday practice there was hardly any difference from their enslaved existence. At first glance it appears that manumission was more conditional in Sri Lanka than in the Cape Colony, but further research needs to support that assumption (Ekama, 2012).

6. Ekama (2012). The term ‘chain manumission’ was used by Ellen Neslo in her 2016 doctoral thesis on the rise of a coloured elite in nineteenth-century Surinam. The English translation was used in Fatah-Black (2020).

7. Together with Vincent Laarman I processed 28 sample years (1702–1705, 1720–1721, 1723–1729, 1745–1753, 1755–1759 and 1762–1765). One hundred and sixty out of 324 last wills (26%) made references to manumitting enslaved, and 596 named individuals were promised their freedom once the owner had passed away. That makes 1341 planned-for individual manumissions if extrapolated to the entire period 1702–1765, or 21 per year on average for the greater Colombo area. Using manumission deeds, Ekama calculated that between February 1750 and June 1752, 81 enslaved people were set free this way, and between February 1779 and September 1795 a total of 127 enslaved individuals (Ekama, 2012). The relative discrepancy between these average numbers merits further research into the relationship between last wills and manumission deeds.

8. Land rights were a complicated matter in colonial Sri Lanka, and it was hardly a free land market as we conceptualize it today, with Company-owned land, untouchable paraveni (ancestral lands), conditional land donations by the Company to loyal subjects, etc. (Rupesinghe, 2017; Bulten, 2022).

9. For seven sample years in the 1720s (minus the incomplete year 1721 and missing years 1722–1723) 120 enslaved individuals were found, of whom 48 were gifted something (40%). Of those 48 individuals, 14 were promised a plot of land by their owner (12% of total). Sri Lanka National Archives (SLNA) 1/2561, 1/2563 & 1/2564.

10. In theory there could have been plots of land promised further in the hinterland, thus excluding these manumitted slaves from the thombo registers of the suburbs. However, the analysis of the thombo registers of the entire Galle province shows that manumitted slaves usually owned land in concentrated areas in the suburbs of Galle. There is no indication just yet that this should be any different in the Colombo province, but more research is needed.

11. Dorinda was probably born in October 1726 in or around Colombo as the daughter of a certain Bastiaan and Catharina, most likely with an enslaved background (as both of them were registered without last names). Shortly thereafter, Dorinda was baptised on 25 October 1726 in the large Dutch Reformed Church of Colombo (Wolvendaalse Kerk). In 1766 she had three children: daughters Dorothea (ca. 1751) and Bellisanta (ca. 1754) and the literal Benjamin (ca. 1758). On 19 November 1764, she had inherited a garden (plot of land) from her former mistress widow Simons, whose father had acquired that land in 1720. On her land in the village of Marendaen (annex of Sint Sebastiaan), Dorinda also lived with Flora (ca. 1741), freed slave of that same mistress. SLNA 1/3802, Marendaen, 5 and SLNA 1/3758, Marendaen, 5.

12. SLNA 1/7562, Watterecke, 23.

13. SLNA 1/7434A, Ettiligodde, 14.

14. Ziela was the ‘freed’ slave of Matthijs de Zaa Wickremenaijke Abbekon, former mudaliyar of the Porta (i.e. residence of Colombo’s governor). This officer and advisor was a crucial link between the Dutch colonial government and the local population. In 1753, Ziela lived on a piece of land together with his brother Adriaan (aged 35), his unmarried sister Christina (aged 48) and her two sons (aged 12 and 17). Ziela had come into possession of this land via a Sinhalese donation ola (palm-leaf document) on 3 December 1737. SLNA 1/7395B, Ahangamme, 5.

15. Suzanna Dias was the widow of Ginterre Radage Louis Fernando. Her two daughters shared the house with her; Maria lived elsewhere in the village (probably married) and the other daughter in ‘Caliture’ (Kalutara, see Figure S2), about 20 kilometers south of Keselwatte. SLNA 1/3802, Keheelwatte, 25 and SLNA 1/3758, Keheelwatte, 25.

16. However, even mortality should not be of huge influence, as we found people referring to their relative as a manumitted slave in the thombo registers. Also, outmigration might have accounted for a somewhat lower number of actual landowners in the Colombo suburbs, but of course migration from elsewhere on the island to the biggest suburb on Sri Lanka should balance that out.

17. In 2023 the NWO-funded research project ‘Forgotten Lineages. Afterlives of Dutch Slavery in the Indian Ocean World’ began. Together with PI Nira Wickramasinghe (Leiden University Institute for Area Studies) and PhD students Sanayi Marcelinne and Pouwel van Schouten, the author of this article will carry out research on precisely this research topic.