Dutch in Sri Lanka

The Primary interest of the Dutch, as in the East Indies and parts of Southeast Asia, was spices. They received a promise of a monopoly over the island's spice trade in return for help in driving out the Portuguese. But the Kandyan compact with the Dutch proved as ill-fated as the earlier alliance with the Portuguese.



The Dutch recaptured the eastern ports for the kandyans. But when they regained Galle and Negombo in 1641, they decided to keep these ports for themselves. The Hollanders also seized the Portuguese fort of Colombo in 1656 and drove the last of the Iberians from Ceylon, as it was now known, in the year 1658 with the capture of jaffna. In defiance of their pact with the kandyan rulers, the Dutch held onto most of this captured terriory. Sri Lanka had merely exchanged the rule of one European power for another. Through it all, the kandyan kingdom stubbornly maintained its independence. In the course of time, Kandy's survival as an independent Sinhalese Kingdom led to the emergence of a dichotomy among the Sinhalese themselves - a distinction between the low country coastal people and the Kandyans of the interior.