This is the script for my video posted on August 12, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
Sri Lanka is one of those places that most people have heard of but know next to nothing about. But the country is a fascinating place with a bloody history, and it’s disproportionately important to geopolitics. So what makes Sri Lanka more important than you might expect?
While Sri Lanka has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, its modern colonial history starts in 1505 when the Portuguese landed, seized the coastal lowlands, and built a fort at what's now the capital of Colombo.
The Dutch East India Company displaced the Portuguese in the mid-17th century, followed by the British in 1796, who turned Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was once known, into a Crown Colony in 1802.
Meanwhile, the inland Kingdom of Kandy that had been established in the late 15th century became the last independent native polity on the island thanks to mountainous geography, guerrilla tactics, and sharp resistance and diplomacy. It fell in 1815 anyway, less by conquest than by its own nobles turning on an unpopular king and signing a treaty with Britain that promised to protect Buddhism. A rebellion two years later was crushed with enormous brutality.
This ended over 2000 years of monarchy and began a new era. The British built a plantation economy on coffee, then switched to tea, importing huge numbers of South Indian Tamil laborers to work the hills. This created a distinct community of Indian Tamils in the up-country separate from the Sri Lankan Tamils who had been there for centuries.
The thing is, under British rule, Tamils, especially those from the Jaffna peninsula, ended up overrepresented in the civil service and prominent professions, not through British favoritism but because American missionaries had built English-language schools in the Jaffna area, and its thin farmland pushed Tamils to treat education as the only way up. But the Sinhalese majority experienced it as a rigged deck, and when Ceylon gained independence in 1948, they acted on it.
The Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 and the laws that followed rendered more than 700k Indian Tamils stateless and stripped their vote. The 1956 Sinhala Only Act made Sinhala the sole official language. Riots against Tamils broke out, and Tamils were systematically disadvantaged in the country’s systems. A pact between India and Ceylon arranged for some to be repatriated to India and others granted Sri Lankan citizenship, but this took over 50 years to complete.
The 1972 Constitution made Ceylon the Republic of Sri Lanka and gave Buddhism the “foremost place” in the country. Six years later, a second constitution created the powerful executive presidency the country still runs on today.
In 1976, a militant group of Tamils seeking to create an independent homeland for ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka formed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, more commonly known as the Tamil Tigers.
They fought a brutal 26-year civil war, industrializing self-destructive bombing techniques, carrying out high-profile political assassinations, and operating a sophisticated conventional military force.
At the same time, the Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or JVP, sought a communist takeover of the island and launched an insurrection in 1971 that killed thousands.
In 1983, a Tamil Tiger ambush killed 13 soldiers, and Sinhalese mobs responded with the Black July pogrom, using voter rolls to find Tamil homes and kill around 1000 people across the country. Around 150k Tamils were made homeless and a huge Tamil exodus followed. This is generally treated as the start of the full-scale civil war.
India trained and armed Tamil militant groups in the early 1980s, but the 1987 Indo-Lanka Accord was crafted to devolve power to Tamil-majority regions, and the 13th Amendment passed later that year set up provincial councils to do it. The parties hoped this would create peace, but it triggered violent backlash in Sri Lanka, deep resentment in India, and a bloody war between the Indian Peace Keeping Force and the Tamil Tigers.
The Marxist JVP simultaneously started a second and much bloodier insurrection that killed tens of thousands, many at the hands of state-backed death squads. The group’s leader, Rohana Wijeweera, was killed in 1989. But this same JVP is a major political faction today.
India experienced thousands of casualties and only withdrew in 1990 at Sri Lanka’s insistence. Nonetheless, the Tamil Tigers assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.
Slowly, the competing factions grew tired and weak. Norway brokered a ceasefire in 2002, and infighting in the Tamil Tigers saw the group split in 2004. The war ended in May 2009 when the military under President Mahinda Rajapaksa cornered the Tigers on a strip of northeastern coast and killed their leader. The final months were a slaughter. UN experts later estimated as many as 40k civilians died, and both sides were accused of war crimes. Nobody has been held accountable. In that final stretch China gave Sri Lanka diplomatic cover at the UN and, with Pakistan, supplied weapons and money, which sets the stage for today.
This is all brutal history, and almost none of it was about shipping. But shipping is why nearly everyone else in the world cares. The strait between Sri Lanka and India is too shallow for ocean-going ships, so east-west traffic has to swing around the bottom of the island. That puts Sri Lanka within about ten miles of the trunk route running from the Suez Canal to the Strait of Malacca, which makes it enormously valuable for transshipment.
Colombo is among the world's top 25 container ports, and Indian cargo makes up roughly 70% of what it transships, because India's own ports long lacked the necessary depth and capacity. But that's now changing. India opened a deepwater port at Vizhinjam in 2024 and is starting to pull that cargo home. The port of Trincomalee is also one of the best deep natural harbors in the world and was developed by the British Admiralty as a major naval base. The oil tank farm in China Bay is the largest in South Asia.
But Hambantota is the really interesting one. China's Exim Bank funded construction of the port starting in 2007. The port lost money, and in 2017 Sri Lanka gave a 99-year lease on its operations to a Chinese state company for about 1.1b dollars, which went straight into its foreign reserves. Sri Lanka keeps sovereignty and security control. But the US and India are concerned that it could be used by the Chinese navy.
Colombo has already hosted Chinese submarines and warships in recent years, including a space and missile tracking ship. That last one provoked India and the US to object, and the ship was moved to Hambantota. Sri Lanka let it dock only after it agreed to keep its tracking system on and conduct no research in Sri Lankan waters. Sri Lanka has since barred foreign research vessels outright.
India’s attempts to counter Chinese influence have been bumpy. It’s struggled to get new wind and power transmission projects off the ground due to cost. But in 2025 it did sign its first ever defense pact with Sri Lanka, it’s building a solar plant and a new container terminal, and it’s turning Trincomalee into an energy hub with a pipeline to the mainland in collaboration with the UAE. They’ve also floated the prospect of a land bridge between India and Sri Lanka.
The trouble is, southern India contains millions of Tamils who are extremely wary of Sri Lanka thanks to its history. Indian domestic politics limits how closely the Indian government can be seen to embrace Sri Lanka.
But Sri Lanka needs economic help from someone, whether it’s China, the US, or India. Most recently, its deep tax cuts in 2019 gutted revenue. The same year, Easter Sunday bombings by a local Islamist group killed over 250 people, gutted tourism, and set off a wave of violence against Sri Lanka's Muslims, who are about a tenth of the country. COVID collapsed tourism and remittances. Then in April 2021, a ban on imports of chemical fertilizer and pesticides to save foreign exchange rates and help the environment cut rice output by 20-40% and tea yields by 16-27%. The country lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and though the fertilizer ban was reversed in 2021, the damage was done.
Meanwhile, global terms of trade shifted dramatically in 2022 thanks to the war in Ukraine, and Sri Lanka’s usable currency reserves fell to under 50m USD. Inflation and food prices skyrocketed, and in April 2022 Sri Lanka defaulted on its foreign debt for the first time in its history. Fuel ran out, the power went off, and the mass protests drove President Rajapaksa to flee the country and resign.
You might have heard that Chinese loans sank Sri Lanka. But the truth is that most of its foreign debt was ordinary sovereign bonds held by Western investors. Sri Lanka mostly bankrupted itself. The IMF approved a roughly 3b dollar loan program in 2023, conditioned on real steps to fix the country's finances and fight corruption, and unlocking it required assurances from bilateral creditors. India was first to step up, followed by Japan and the Paris Club, with China negotiating separately.
But in 2024 a political earthquake changed everything. A coalition led by the Marxist JVP I mentioned won the presidency. Anura Kumara Dissanayake, or AKD for short, took power and immediately dissolved the parliament. His coalition, the NPP, won a supermajority with surprising support from the Tamil north and east. The JVP had historically tried to overthrow the state two times before and historically held Sinhala-nationalist, anti-Indian, anti-devolution positions. But it now governs with a two-thirds majority. It’s taken a softer stance on all those issues, but it’s still not yet fully clear how this will change Sri Lanka going forward.
Keep reading
- How did Japan end up controlling China’s gateway to the Pacific?
- Why is the Yellow Sea so important?
- Why do Asia’s powerful countries care about Timor-Leste?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.