• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

The Great War

It is estimated that 2,182 Ceylon men (Europeans 1,573, and Sinhalese 609) joined the British Army during the World War and a further 1,204 were recruited for service as clerks and mechanics. The "Ceylon Sanitary Company," raised in 1917, rendered conspicuously valuable service in Mesopotamia.

The smaller colonies which could not send troops sent supplies. From the Barbadoes, the Falklands, the Windward and Leeward Islands came gifts of money. Ceylon sent tea, British Guiana and Mauritius sent sugar, South Africa sent corn, Australia sent butter, bacon, condensed milk and beef, Canada sent one million bags of flour as well as oats, coal, cheese, potatoes, tinned salmon, and horses. India gave huge sums of money, horses, camels, jewels, ambulances and men.

Rubber was one of a very few commodities whose price was not to any considerable degree affected by the Great War. Enormous growth of the rubber plantation industry during the last few years, the falling off of rubber imports into Germany and the character of the War Trade Board rubber allocations were some of the factors responsible for this phenomenon.

The low level of Brazilian (wild) and Ceylon (plantation) rubber prices running throughout the period of the Great War was broken by violent rises only three times. The first important advance was that of plantation rubber in the latter part of 1914, which was due to Great Britain's declaring rubber as contraband of war in October of that year and to the establishment in November of an embargo on rubber shipments from any English ports. The price of Ceylon rubber rose from 56.5 cents per pound in August to 74.5 cents in December 1914, and to 81 cents in January 1915. When the embargo was lifted for the United States in January, 1915, the price fell back to about 63 cents a pound.

The next advance, both for Para and Ceylon variety, occurred in the latter part of 1915 and the early part of 1916, the highest level being reached in January, when the price was $1.05 a pound for Ceylon and $1.00 for Para. This rise as well as the one at the beginning of 1917 was due largely to the activities of German submarines.

World War I had only a minimal military impact on Ceylon, which entered the war as part of the British Empire. The closest fighting took place in the Bay of Bengal, where an Australian warship sank a German cruiser. But the war had an important influence on the growth of nationalism. The Allies' wartime propaganda extolled the virtues of freedom and self-determination of nations, and the message was heard and duly noted by Ceylonese nationalists.

There was, however, an event, only indirectly related to the war, that served as the immediate spark for the growth of nationalism. In 1915 communal rioting broke out between the Sinhalese and Muslims on the west coast. The British panicked, misconstruing the disturbances as part of an antigovernment conspiracy; they blamed the majority ethnic group and indiscriminately arrested many Sinhalese, including D.S. Senanayake--the future first prime minister of Ceylon--who had actually tried to use his influence to curb the riots.

The British put down the unrest with excessive zeal and brutality, which shocked British and Ceylonese observers alike. Some sympathetic accounts of the unrest take into consideration that the judgment of the governor of the time, Sir Robert Chalmers (1913-16), may have been clouded by the loss of his two sons on the Western Front in Europe. At any rate, his actions insured that 1915 was a turning point in the nationalist movement. From then on, activists mobilized for coordinated action against the British.

The nationalist movement in India served as a model to nationalists in Ceylon. In 1917 the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League mended their differences and issued a joint declaration for the "progressive realization" of responsible government in India. Nationalists in Ceylon learned from their Indian counterparts that they had to become more national and less partisan in their push for constitutional reform. In 1919 the major Sinhalese and Tamil political organizations united to form the Ceylon National Congress.

One of the first actions of the congress was to submit a proposal for a new constitution that would increase local control over the Executive Council and the budget. These demands were not met, but they led to the promulgation of a new constitution in 1920. Amendments to the constitution in 1924 increased Ceylonese representation. Although the nationalists' demand for representation in the Executive Council was not granted, the Legislative Council was expanded to include a majority of elected Ceylonese unofficial members, bringing the island closer to representative government. Yet the franchise remained restrictive and included only about 4 percent of the island's population.