The best short history of Sri Lanka is Chandra Richard de Silva's Sri Lanka: A History (1987). A discussion of the political background and politics of Sri Lanka can be found in the Sri Lanka chapters of Government and Politics in South Asia (4th ed. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998), by Craig Baxter et al.
Although there have been many books on the Sri Lankan civil war, many are slanted toward one of the two sides. Many of these works have been published in Sri Lanka, India, and Europe and are not easily available in the United States. Among the works easily found in the United States are a pair of articles written by Sri Lankan president Chandrika Kumaratunga and Robert Oberst in the June, 1996, issue of the Harvard International Review. They provide a good description of the differing perspectives of the conflict. An overview of the conflict written by a Tamil is Chelvadurai Manogaran's Ethnic Conflict and Reconciliation in Sri Lanka (1992).
Readers looking for more information on the growth of Tamil nationalism may consult A. Jeyaratnam Wilson's Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism: Its Origins and Development in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2000). For a scholarly work on ethnic identities and allegiances, Ethnic Attachments in Sri Lanka: Social Change and Cultural Continuity (2001), by Lakshmanan Sabaratnam, will be useful.
A great deal of information is available on the Internet, although readers should be careful, because most of it reflects the viewpoints of one side at the expense of the truth. These sites include the Sri Lankan government news site (Http://www. news. lk) and the Ministry of Defence military press releases (http:// Www. news. lk/another. htm). Tamilnet publishes news from a Tamil perspective (Http://www. tamilnet. com). The LTTE Web site also provides news and analysis (Http://www. eelam. com).
World History
