ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Factories of Famine: Sieges and Scarcity in 17th-century Ceylon

• In Event: Food, Scarcity and Knowledge in Colonial and Atlantic Worlds (1500-1800). Panel N. 3

English Abstract

This presentation examines the ecological and victual consequences of European fortified trading posts, known as ‘factories,’ on Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the long seventeenth century (ca.1580-1720). The paper investigates how colonists tried to attain local peoples’ knowledge of seasonal patterns, microclimates, and secure supply routes to sustain the proliferating number of these colonial settlements. Only with such knowledge could they achieve their goal of maximising food security on one hand and the cultivation of cash crops for export on the other. As a case study, the paper focuses on the conflicts between the Kingdom of Kandy and Portugal, along with the Dutch East India Company (VOC) who allied with the former to drive out their Iberian rivals from the island. With the Portuguese takeover of the northern Jaffna kingdom at the turn of the seventeenth century, the Kandyan court ruling the island’s interior enlisted the Dutch as allies. Descriptions of the protracted sieges on coastal factories and inland cities by armies on both sides are filled with references to the deprivation of not only foodstuff (rice, millet, etc.) but also resources like timber for building ships and structures that constituted these physical projections of commercial and religious empire.

Author

• Jin-Woo Choi, Harvard University