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In the last decade, there has been an important change in the historiography of decolonization in South Asia. While the field was for a long time dominated by nation-bound visions of the period centring on the years 1947 and 1948, recent studies have emphasized longer-term continuities and post-partition ambiguities at the expense of clear-cut national narratives.1Yet although studies of such major events as partition have become analytically more sophisticated,2research on Ceylon at independence has tended to remain tied to older established frameworks. Meanwhile, important recent work suggests that a clue to some of the major post-1948 ruptures in Ceylon might be found in the way in which the British established themselves as a power within a Ceylonese political-cultural context, which involved breaking extant links between the island and mainland South Asia.3In a similar way, the present article attempts to show how British policies with respect to post-independence Ceylon were to a large extent governed by considerations that were separate to their views of India.
Besides making clear Ceylon's importance to British plans after independence, this article also aims to fill a more general gap in the scholarship concerning the post-independence political relationship between Britain and South Asia, which has tended to overlook Ceylon.4While significant work has been produced on the dynamics of Britain's separation from its former colonies and the place of shifting world currents underlying these dynamics, which have attempted to take in both South Asian perspectives as well as those of Whitehall, attention to Ceylon has been strikingly absent.5This is particularly surprising when we consider Ceylon's strategic importance near the centre of Britain's still visible Indian Ocean imperium as well as its contribution to British trade and commerce in the decade and a half after 1948.6By focusing on British perspectives on the changing relationship with Ceylon, particularly during the turbulent late 1950s and early 1960s, this article also aims to shed new light on the official British attitude towards South Asia during this period. The uncertain political conditions in which the British handed over their rule to native leaders amounted to a 'gamble' against which they weighed the commercial and strategic benefits of relinquishing direct authority.7The gamble may...