Chapter 1 - Building the Landraad

Summary

Abstract

The structure of the existing legal order that was in place before the Dutch arrived in Sri Lanka is an important backdrop to understand the establishment, procedures and operations of the Landraad. The registration of land and sources of the law had lasting effects on society. In this way the institutional development of the Landraad richly illustrates the dilemmas of an early colonial power. Sri Lankan peasants faced courts of record for the first time and the caseloads derived from a hundred cases reveal that the anxieties of the people seeking justice centred on rights to land. Such structural innovations within a new space retained certain family resemblances to local conditions, thereby confirming their plural character.

Keywords: Pre-colonial law, Roman-Dutch law, thombo, legal procedure, colonial law, VOC.

Throughout the Dutch Empire, including the area controlled by the West India Company (WIC) of The Netherlands, the Dutch made varied investments in territorial control and the establishment of commercial networks. The VOC's mandate was a broad one: it was empowered to wage war, enter into treaties and alliances with Asian powers and maintain extensive fiscal and legal administrative regimes. Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius believed that the company was perfectly capable of waging war and signing treaties, which “led him to a theory of divisible sovereignty in which individuals and groups outside the state could possess rights to a public legal personality, particularly in the extra-European world.” Dutch intervention was far from uniform across its territories. The administrative apparatus set up by the Dutch company in Sri Lanka was more elaborate than what it established in contemporary Java, but the VOC was in conflict with the Kandyan kingdom, which disputed the legitimacy of Dutch territorial rule on parts of the island. Unlike in the seventeenth century, when territorial conquest was central to the Dutch, by the eighteenth century they were less interested in territorial expansion despite the war with Kandy from 1760 to 1765. This was a trend seen in other Dutch territories as well.

Through property rights institutions, the Dutch East India Company developed the structures necessary for early colonial state formation in Sri Lanka. This chapter explores how and why the Galle Landraad was set up and how its history was intertwined with the development of land registration.