Book Review

Sri Lanka, the ecologically and culturally diverse island nation in the Indian Ocean that Marco Polo called "Serendib," and that was known as Ceylon until 1972, has had a long and fascinating history. Today six of its ancient cultural treasures and cities and the Sinharaja Rainforest are recognized by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites. Its 65,000 square kilometers are commonly characterized by climate as the lowland wet zone in the southwest, and the dry zone to the north and east. Between these, the central highland massif, origin of all of the island's major rivers, rises abruptly to a peak of over 2,500 meters. Until early in the nineteenth century, these mountains were cloaked in forest and natural grasslands rich in endemic species. In the lower elevation intermediate zone agricultural villages prospered. Less than one hundred years later, the landscape had been transformed. Tea plantations of the British Empire covered vast acreages above one thousand meters, and chena shifting cultivation by villagers had deforested much of the land below. James Webb focuses on this critical transition in the island's history in this carefully researched book.	1
Webb begins with a summary of highland ecology and indigenous settlement and cultivation patterns under the rule of the Kandyan kings in the pre-British colonial period. He highlights the critical role of the highland tropical forest that was intentionally protected as an impenetrable buffer against outsiders. Webb continues on to illustrate the massive environmental and cultural change wrought as the British, who had taken control of the Sri Lanka lowlands from the Dutch in 1801, captured the highlands in 1817, and broke the Kandyan ban on forest clearing. The radical deforestation in the intermediate elevations is portrayed as driven by the colonizers' need for wood to build railroads and by opportunistic village expansion through chena. The author gleans from Sri Lanka's rich English language historical record the challenges and frustrations the colonial power faced in establishing temperate climate food crops in the wet tropical environment and later in developing plantations—first of coffee, then cinchona, and then tea as export crops in the upper highlands. The discussion is well informed by references to the larger British colonial context. A highlight, for example, is the treatment of the role of the Royal Botanical Gardens in facilitating movement of plant materials of medicinal, food, and export crop value throughout the Empire.	2
The story of the British colonial period in the highlands has been told before, e.g. by K. M. De Silva in Sri Lanka: A Survey (London, 1977), and with a focus on social impacts, e.g. of the colonial regime on coffee plantation workers—Donovan Moldrich, Bitter Berry Bondage: The Nineteenth Century Coffee Workers of Sri Lanka (Kandy, Sri Lanka, 1989). Webb, however, is the first to treat the range of causes of highland deforestation in the nineteenth century and to explicitly document the immediate environmental impacts of the land use practices applied, such as losses in soil fertility and reduction in large predator populations. While a more in-depth discussion of the lasting implications of this very significant ecological change for Sri Lanka would have been valuable, the book provides a new window on nineteenth-century Sri Lankan history and a wonderful read in environmental history for the region in general.	3
Reviewed by Yvonne Everett, Department of Environment and Natural Resource Sciences, Humboldt State University.

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