Mischief of the Franchise: The Grant of Universal Suffrage in British Ceylon, 1927-28

Dan Slater, University of Michigan
Iza Ding, Northwester University

Britain unexpectedly introduced universal manhood suffrage to a non-white, non-settler colony for the very first time in 1931 in Ceylon – what is present-day Sri Lanka. This decision ran against the grain of British political thought and political development, which counseled extreme caution in any extension of the franchise beyond the propertied and the literate. It also ran counter to the preferences of Ceylon’s indigenous leaders, who expressed little interest in suffrage expansion in their testimonies before the Donoughmore Commission, which came to Ceylon from November 1927 - January 1928 to devise a new constitution. Through what collective reasoning process did the Donoughmore Commission decide to make Ceylon what would henceforth be considered the first non-white democracy in the world? We argue that British officials began during their visit to Ceylon to think about “safeguards” in a fundamentally new way. Reversing the conventional, quintessentially British logic that anti-majoritarian safeguards (e.g. courts, veto powers, and most of all a strictly restricted suffrage) are essential to constrain the irrational impulses of the general voting public, the Donoughmore Commission gradually concluded that Ceylon’s population urgently needed mass enfranchisement to safeguard the colony against the empowerment of a narrow, non-responsive indigenous political elite. What one commissioner called “the mischief of the franchise” lay not in a franchise that was too wide, as one might expect given British political traditions, but too narrow. British officials arrived in Ceylon wondering what if any safeguards elections required; they left concluding that elections were the required safeguards themselves.

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 Presented in Session 8. Surveillance, Health, and Settler Administration