Caste Conflict Elite Formation

Caste Conflict and Elite Formation is a study in the social history of Sri Lanka.

Michael Roberts (Author)

9780521052856, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 3 December 2007

416 pages
21.7 x 14 x 2.5 cm, 0.545 kg

Caste Conflict and Elite Formation is a study in the social history of Sri Lanka. However, it does not merely document the remarkable successes in business enterprise and in the acquisition of Western-educated professional skills which were achieved by families from the Karava caste during the last two centuries; their advances, and the social and political struggles which accompanied this process, are employed as a window through which a survey of social change in Sri Lanka during the last four hundred years is conducted. The interest of the book extends beyond the many fascinating social incidents, historical trends and channels of elite formation that are described within its pages to a series of controlled comparisons which reveal the factors responsible for the formation of the Karava elite. Thus the book extends the methodological frontiers of the social history of the region. It emphasizes the significance of the patterns of caste discrimination and caste interaction in Sri Lankan politics, and reveals how these patterns were central to the incentives and opportunities which powered the advances of the Karava families.

List of figures, charts and maps
List of tables
Preface
Glossary
List of abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. The Kar?va in the past
3. Caste among the Sinhalese
4. Economic opportunities and social relations, 1500s–1790s
5. The British period: the economic advances of a Kar?va elite
6. Social competition, caste conflict and manifestations of Kar?va power
7. Casteism in South Asian politics during British times: emergent cultural typifications or elite fictions?
8. Causal factors in the moulding of Kar?va entrepreneurship and the emergence of a Kar?va elite
9. Concluding remarks
Tables
Appendices
Select bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: General & world history [HBG]