Who ruled Colombo?

Colombo lies on the low, wet west coast of Sri Lanka, just south of the mouth of the Kelani River. Its sheltered anchorage sat on the sea lanes between Arabia, India and South-East Asia, and the coastal lowlands behind it produced the island's most valuable export, cinnamon. That trade drew Muslim merchants for centuries and then three European empires in turn, Portuguese, Dutch and British, who made the port their stronghold. Colombo became the capital of the whole island only under British rule, and it remains Sri Lanka's largest city and commercial centre.

For most of Sri Lanka's early history the great royal capitals lay inland, at Anuradhapura and later Polonnaruwa, and the kingdoms were centres of Theravada Buddhism. The name Colombo is usually traced to a Sinhala phrase meaning "port on the Kelani river". Arab and other Muslim traders were settling along this coast by about the 8th century, and their descendants form part of the island's Muslim community. The map's long Chola period needs correcting: the south Indian Chola kings occupied the north and centre of the island from 993 to about 1070, after which Sinhalese rule returned. In the 15th and 16th centuries the port belonged to the Kingdom of Kotte, whose capital lay only a few kilometres inland.

Portuguese ships first reached the island in 1505, and the king of Kotte allowed them to trade in cinnamon. In 1517 they began building a fort at Colombo, expelling Muslim merchants who had dominated the trade. Playing on rivalries in the Kotte royal family, the Portuguese came to control the kingdom, and after its last king, a Christian convert under their protection, moved his court into Colombo, the city became the centre of the Portuguese Empire in Sri Lanka. The inland Kingdom of Kandy resisted them throughout.

In 1638 Kandy allied with the Dutch East India Company, and after a siege of seven months the Portuguese surrendered Colombo in May 1656. Under the Dutch, an arm of the Dutch Republic, the city was rebuilt as the walled capital of their coastal territories and the base of a closely guarded cinnamon monopoly. Dutch Reformed churches, canals and a community of mixed European descent, the Burghers, survive from this period.

British forces took Colombo in 1796 with little resistance, and it became the capital of the Crown colony of Ceylon in 1802. After the conquest of Kandy in 1815 it was, for the first time, the capital of the entire island within the British Empire. The British spread the city beyond the old fort, linked it by rail to the coffee and later tea plantations of the hill country, and from 1875 built breakwaters that made it one of the busiest ports of call on the routes to Asia and Australia.

Ceylon gained independence peacefully in 1948 and took the name Sri Lanka in 1972. In July 1983 anti-Tamil riots in Colombo helped set off a civil war that lasted until 2009, during which the city suffered repeated bombings. In the 1980s Parliament moved to Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, now the official capital, on the edge of the city. Colombo was struck by the Easter Sunday bombings of 2019, and in 2022 mass protests during an economic crisis forced the president from office. The city proper had about 750,000 people at the 2011 census, within an urban region of more than five million.