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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 in the past; 3. Caste among the Sinhalese; 4. Economic opportunities and social relations, 1500s1790s; 5. The British period: the economic advances of a Kar elite; 6. Social competition, caste conflict and manifestations of Kar power; 7. Casteism in South Asian politics during British times: emergent cultural typifications or elite fictions?; 8. Causal factors in the moulding of Kar entrepreneurship and the emergence of a Kar elite; 9. Concluding remarks; Tables; Appendices; Select bibliography; Index. ISBN - 9780521059336
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Pages : 416
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