Nadeera Rupesinghe, Lawmaking in Dutch Sri Lanka. Navigating Pluralities in a Colonial Society, Amsterdam: Leiden University Press, 2023. Pp. 316. € 66,00 paperback (ISBN 9789087283759).

Lawmaking in Dutch Sri Lanka's cover is adorned by one of Jan Brandes' (1743-1808) famous watercolours-a large tree, a small house in the background, and two obscure figures, presumably planting the soil of their garden.This supposed idyllic image is one of the focal points of Nadeera Rupesinghe's rigorous study of law, landownership, and the complicated relationship between the colonizing Dutch and the colonized locals in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka.Rupesinghe's book centres the Landraad, or Land Council: a legal forum set up by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) dealing with land management.Crucial to the Company's control over the vast coastal areas and people they had conquered, these judicial forums were established from the 1740s onwards in the main commandments of Dutch Sri Lanka.Rupesinghe singles out the Galle Landraad, an important southern port of the Dutch until they were ousted from the island by the British in the 1790s.While this legal institution was primarily established as an instrument for colonial domination, in practice it became the primary place where locals could settle disputes around landownership.Rupesinghe calls it 'a site for negotiation between the Sinhalese, other locals, and the VOC (:::).Yet this process was mired in uncertainty and confusion, and lacked a clear trajectory' (259).By emphasizing the lived experience of the litigants, councilors, and others who were roped into the legal theatre of the Landraad, Rupesinghe complicates our view of colonial law-not as a mere imposition of Dutch-Roman law, but as actively mediated, applied, and sometimes resisted.Through the concept of legal pluralism, 'the existence of two or more legal systems in varying degrees of synchronism' (27), she demonstrates the complexities of colonial rule in early-modern Sri Lanka.The first three chapters of the book scrupulously set up the stage of the Landraad.Chapter 1 deals with the creation of the institution and its precolonial influences.While the institution was a Dutch invention, Sri Lankan locals were