Colonialism and Health Policy Affecting Workers in Sri Lanka's Plantation Sector

Abstract

One of the major problems that European colonizers faced in Asia was the reluctance of indigenous agricultural societies to respond to their large-scale labor requirement. This article focuses on plantation owners and managers in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) during the height of nineteenth-century coffee plantation production, and the strategies they used to control indentured workers from India in Ceylon. In particular, caste distinctions were perpetuated among the workforce; this legacy has implications for social life on the estates in current Sri Lanka, engaged in an ethnic conflict between the political minority Tamil and political majority Sinhala populations. This article focuses especially on health and sanitation issues for workers during the colonial plantation era, and the need for government intervention—that was not forthcoming—on behalf of the workers. This research is part of a larger project (cf. Hettiarachchi 1989) drawing on the archival methods of history and the ethnographic methods of anthropology to document conditions for plantation workers. Attention to historical strategies of worker control can provide insights into the current relationship between states, low-wage labor forces, and health care policies.