Category Archives: racist thinking

Michael Roberts 

 The ‘discovery’ of the Lorenz Cabinet in the Royal Asiatic Society in the 1980s led me to combine with Percy Colin-Thome[1] and Ismeth Raheem in working up this material into a four-volume book.[2] The first book in this projected series was drafted by me and came out in 1989 courtesy of Sarvodaya Publishing Services (within the limitations of book production in that period).[3] This book has been out of print for quite a while. Though the opening segment of the book, decoding the famous Sinhala story about the first sight of the Portuguese on their shores, a tale that that has been passed down over the centuries, was presented to the world way back in time as an article,[4] the rest of People Inbetween – dealing with (a) British racial prejudices and practices; (b) the process of Westernization, competition and jostling among the emerging middle class families and (c) the introduction of census data collection by the modernizing government and the implications thereof, has not seen wider circulation (though some items in Thuppahi in 2022 have focused on some of these activities – see Appendix A).

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