Plantation Patriarchy and Structural Violence: Women Workers in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Plantation production began in Sri Lanka in the early 19th century under British colonial rule, when the government provided financial incentives and infrastructural support for the commercialisation and export of agricultural crops in line with promoting laissez-faire capitalism. Motivated by the possibility of making high profits, British entrepreneurs, including several officials, took up the large-scale cultivation of initially coffee, and then subsequently, tea, rubber and coconut. Keen to minimise their costs of labour, the planters recruited workers from neighbouring districts of the Madras Presidency in south India where there were large numbers badly affected by the widespread famine and indebtedness in the region. The spread of plantation production in the 19th and 20th centuries resulted in a more permanent workforce, constituting the single largest and organised segment of the working class in the country. While women formed a small proportion of the early pattern of migration, their numbers subsequently increased and, by the 20th century, they comprised half the now permanent workforce on the plantations.