Writing Away Sovereignty: Constitutional Theory, Political Crisis, and the Colonial Construction of the Maldives, 1883

By Pen for Rights

Independence Day, 26 July

Author’s Note

For more than a century, H. C. P. Bell has been remembered principally as the foremost recorder of Maldivian history. This article revisits his work from a different perspective, examining it within the constitutional, political, and archival developments that preceded the British Protectorate of 1887.

Written for historians, university lecturers, students, members of the Maldives National Defence Force, policymakers, and all readers interested in the constitutional history of the Maldives, the study is based on the documentary record presently available and distinguishes between established evidence, historical inference, and questions that remain open to further archival research.

Every 26 July, the Maldives marks the day the Protectorate ended: the moment in 1965 when a formal instrument of subordination was finally undone. That is worth celebrating. But an anniversary that only counts backward as far as 1887 tells the flattering half of the story. The harder question is not how the Maldives recovered its sovereignty, but how, and by whom, that sovereignty was quietly written away in the first place. That happened four years before any treaty existed, in a report commissioned by, and printed at the expense of, the colonial Government of Ceylon: the British administration then based in Colombo, not any government of the Maldives.

That report was H. C. P. Bell’s The Maldive Islands: An Account of the Physical Features, Climate, History, Inhabitants, Productions and Trade (Colombo, 1883). For a century and a half, Maldivian historiography has treated Bell as a benefactor: the tireless antiquarian who copied inscriptions, rescued the state chronicles from oblivion, and gave the nation back its own past. When the Maldives National Centre for Linguistic and Historical Research reprinted his later monograph in 1985 under presidential patronage, it called his life’s work “the most comprehensive work on Maldivian history to-date” and an “invaluable guide” for “every Maldivian.” Nobody, in a century of gratitude, has looked hard at what Bell was actually hired to do, or at what, quite literally, left the country in his custody and never came back.

This article argues that the Protectorate of 1887 was not simply the product of a treaty. It emerged through three related processes: the constitutional reinterpretation of Maldivian sovereignty that Bell himself set down in 1883, the political crisis of 1886 to 1887 that created the conditions in which that reinterpretation could be formalised, and the archival transfer through which the documentary record of Maldivian statehood came under colonial custody. What follows traces each in turn, a constitutional extraction, a political extraction and an archival extraction: sovereignty, governance and memory. Each was taken by a different instrument and through a different administrative process, a report, a succession crisis, a records transfer, but all three unfolded within the same decade and within the same colonial relationship between Malé and Colombo.

A Report, Not a Relic

Bell was not a freelance scholar indulging a private passion. He was a serving officer of the Ceylon Civil Service, and his 1883 report was, in the words printed under the royal arms on its own title page, “Ordered by His Excellency the Governor to be Printed.” Bell states his brief plainly. Ceylon, he complains in his Introduction, had maintained a political connection with the Maldives “extending over eighty years” that had “tended to throw little or no light either on the internal administration of the Islands or on the habits of the people.” He wanted that indifference replaced by something else entirely: he hoped “this apathy on the part of the protecting Government may now at length give place to real and permanent concern for the welfare of its hitherto neglected dependency.”

Notice the vocabulary alone. In 1883, Bell is already calling Ceylon “the protecting Government” and the Maldives its “dependency,” four years before any protectorate was ever signed. His collaborator Albert Gray made the same point more bluntly still, in a line Bell quotes with evident approval:

“Measures should be taken by the Ceylon Government without delay to render more intimate the connection with its dependency, and overcoming the jealousy of the Maldive ruler, if any still exists, to extend to his subjects some of the benefits of Ceylon civilization.”

Overcoming the jealousy of the ruler is not the language of a historian describing a kingdom. It is the language of an officer identifying an obstacle to policy and recommending how it should be managed.

The Ledger of a Dependency

Move past the Introduction and the report reads less like a monograph than a country assessment. Section III, “Political Division,” does not stop at the geography of the thirteen atolls; it runs straight into a subsection headed, without euphemism, “Defence.” There Bell weighs the archipelago “in the event of maritime war,” observes that it lies “within two to three days’ steam of Ceylon and the Coast of Hindustan,” and concludes the islands “could advantageously be selected as a rendezvous and temporary station, or as a point d’appui for war-vessels destined to harass the marine of the enemy in the East.” He revives an 1836 naval proposal to develop Ihavandhippolhu as a coaling depot, notes that “equal facilities exist” at Kaashidhoo and again at Suvadiva and Addu in the south, weighs whether the atolls “could be strongly defended,” and points to the old Portuguese fort at Malé as “a standing proof of the practicability of erecting fairly substantial works at important points.” He even reaches back a century to note that “the shrewd Dupleix” had once occupied Male’ with French troops in the Anglo-French struggle for southern India, which Bell offers as proof that a European rival already understood what the islands were worth.

Bell did not make this case in isolation. Appended to the Defence subsection is a note reporting that “the question of the potential capabilities of the Maldive group, as of possible future service to the Imperial Government on military and commercial grounds, assumes the more interest at the present time from the recent official inspection of Diego Garcia,” the principal island of the Chagos Archipelago, some four hundred miles south of the Maldives, surveyed that same year by H.M. “Eclipse.” Bell reprints the local press coverage at length: the Ceylon Times reporting “commanding positions for the erection of one or more batteries” and the judgment that “one battery and a small force of Artillery, with a company of Infantry, would amply suffice for all purposes of protection,” and the Ceylon Examiner describing the harbour as “admirably adapted for a coaling station” on the route between the Red Sea and Australia. The Maldives, in other words, were being assessed by the same official mind, in the same year, using the same vocabulary of batteries, coaling depots and garrison requirements, as an island group four hundred miles away that a British survey ship had just finished inspecting for precisely those purposes.

None of this is incidental color in an antiquarian survey. Chapters on revenue, currency, fisheries, trade and legal custom sit alongside an inventory of anchorages, coaling stations and fortification sites, compiled for officials who had never set foot on the islands and needed to know, in the plainest terms, what the Maldives were worth and how they might be held.

Read together with the constitutional argument Bell was about to set down in his own Appendix A, this strategic assessment shows that his report was never really one document. It was three at once, a legal memorandum, a political survey and a strategic appreciation, bound under a single government cover and printed under a single set of royal arms.

The Blueprint Nobody Reads: Appendix A

The passage that the celebratory reading of Bell has never had to reckon with sits in Appendix A of the 1883 report, titled “Political Status of the Sultan.” It opens with a sentence that ought to stop any honest reader cold:

“It may not be disadvantageous to attempt to set at rest the question of the exact political status of the Maldive Sultan as regards the English Government in Ceylon.”

No treaty existed in 1883. Bell says so himself: the connection had “subsisted without any specific treaty or agreement” for nearly two hundred and fifty years. Undeterred, he builds one out of inference, working from the annual tributary letters exchanged between the Sultans and the Dutch and British Governors: pleas for protection, professions of gratitude, requests that Colombo “make war with My enemies.” From these alone he sets down three findings, numbered like the conclusions of a tribunal:

(i.) That the Maldive Sultans have voluntarily courted defensive alliance with the dominant European power in Ceylon, by placing themselves of their own accord under its protection… (ii.) That in the absence of any express treaty or agreement, the role of suzerain has been accepted by each power in turn, by inference clearly deducible from official correspondence… (iii.) That the present political status of the Maldives is that of a semi-sovereign State, under the exclusive protectorate of the English Government in Ceylon, a relation very similar to that of the King of the Isle of Man with John of England, established by Treaty of A.D. 1212.

In 1883, four years before a single protectorate document was signed, a Ceylon civil servant had already declared the Maldives a protectorate by inference, without a treaty, reaching for the precise constitutional analogy, the Isle of Man, that a protectorate relationship would require. The status the Agreement of 16 December 1887 put into legal force corresponds closely to this earlier analysis. That is more than a coincidence of chronology; it is documentary continuity, and it belongs at the centre of any honest account of how the Maldives lost, and eighty years later recovered, its sovereignty.

The Missing Years

Appendix A, to recall the point, was legal argument, not accomplished fact. What turned that four-year-old theory into a treaty is a sequence of events worth telling before it is read for its constitutional meaning.

Bell’s report appeared in 1883. Sultan Ibrahim Nooraddeen, identified by Bell in 1883 as the reigning Sultan, reigned from 1882 until he lost the throne in 1886. His fall did not resolve into an orderly succession. It opened a contest between rival noble households, remembered in Maldivian accounts as the Athireege and Kakaage factions, each drawing support from different offices of the court and different quarters of the capital. Succession disputes of this kind were not unknown to the Maldivian sultanate, whose throne had changed hands through intrigue and deposition more than once within living memory, but the crisis that opened in 1886 unfolded with unusual intensity, and it culminated in the Great Fire of Male’, which Maldivian historical sources attribute to Ibrahim Dhoshimeynaa Kaleygefaanu and which is said to have destroyed a substantial part of the capital at the height of the succession dispute, layering a physical emergency on top of a political one.

The fire’s importance to this argument is not only that it happened, but what a fire does to a court already divided over succession. Maldivian accounts describe it as having damaged buildings and stores at the heart of the capital at the precise moment rival households were contesting the throne. As a structural matter, that combination of circumstances meant that whichever party could secure outside assistance, in materials, credit, or simply an assurance of protection against further disorder, stood to gain relative to its rivals; this is an inference about the shape of the crisis, not a claim the contemporary record documents directly. That is exactly the kind of leverage a protecting power is positioned to supply, and exactly the kind of leverage Bell’s Appendix A had already theorized four years earlier: protection extended in return for a more exclusive claim on the Sultanate’s external relations. Whether the fire was invoked in these terms by any specific faction, or by the Ceylon Government itself, is not established by the sources available for this article. What can be said is that a capital already destabilized by succession rivalry, and freshly damaged by fire, was a court considerably more likely to value the kind of protection Bell had already described than one operating at full strength.

Members of the political elite are reported in the same accounts to have crossed to Ceylon during this period, seeking refuge, information, or a hearing from the colonial administration that Bell’s report had, only three years earlier, urged toward closer engagement with Male’s affairs. British officials in Colombo are recorded as having followed the unrest closely, though how far that attention extended into active involvement in the crisis itself is a question the surviving published record does not settle, and one that would repay closer work in the Ceylon Government’s confidential files for 1886 and 1887. Out of this instability Muhammad Mueenuddeen II acceded to the throne in 1886. Roughly a year and a half after the fire, on 16 December 1887, it was Mueenuddeen II, not Nooraddeen, who concluded the Protectorate Agreement with the British Governor of Ceylon. Nooraddeen would not return to the throne until 1889, the year after the Agreement he had no part in signing.

The sources available for this article say considerably less about Mueenuddeen II himself than about the crisis that brought him to the throne. Standard secondary accounts record his reign dates and the fact of his signature on the Agreement, but say little about his political standing before 1886, his relationship to the Athireege and Kakaage households whose rivalry is described above, or how he came to be the candidate the crisis settled on. That asymmetry is itself worth noting. A colonial official’s report survives in enough detail to be quoted at length more than a century later; the domestic political position of the Sultan who acted on the arrangement it anticipated survives, in the sources consulted here, largely as a name and a pair of dates. Closing that gap would require Maldivian court records and genealogies of the kind catalogued, and removed, in the archive discussed below, rather than anything in the Ceylon Government’s own files.

Whether Bell’s constitutional analysis of 1883 influenced British policy in any direct sense cannot be demonstrated from the surviving published record alone, and this article does not claim otherwise. What can be demonstrated is narrower, and for that reason harder to dismiss: within four years of Appendix A, a succession crisis at Male’ resulted in a change of Sultan, with the new Sultan signing, within about eighteen months of acceding, an agreement whose structure that theory had already anticipated. What the surviving record supports is continuity, not authorship; establishing anything closer to direct causation would require the kind of Ceylon Government correspondence for 1886 and 1887 that has not yet been systematically examined for this purpose.

That continuity can be tested directly, because Appendix A’s own findings can be set against the instrument Mueenuddeen II actually signed. Standard secondary accounts of the 1887 Agreement describe its substance in broadly consistent terms: Britain assumed responsibility for the Maldives’ foreign policy and defence; the Sultan retained internal self-government, administered through the traditional Muslim institutions of the court; an annual tribute continued; and Britain undertook, in exchange, to extend military protection and to refrain from interfering in domestic administration. Bell’s first finding, that the Sultans had “voluntarily courted defensive alliance… by placing themselves of their own accord under its protection, and by the tender of actual or virtual tribute,” anticipates the tribute and protection clauses of 1887 almost exactly. His second, that “the role of suzerain has been accepted by each power in turn, by inference clearly deducible from official correspondence,” describes in embryonic form the very transfer of external affairs that the Agreement made explicit and binding. His third and most consequential finding, that the Maldives already amounted to “a semi-sovereign State, under the exclusive protectorate of the English Government in Ceylon,” reads less like an approximation of the 1887 settlement than a description of it, set down four years before that settlement existed in law.

None of this proves that the negotiators of 1887 had Appendix A open on the table in front of them, though the fact that Bell’s report sat in the Ceylon Government’s own files, ordered printed by the Governor himself, makes the possibility more than idle speculation. What can be said with confidence, pending a clause by clause comparison against the original 1887 instrument, is that the conceptual architecture of the Agreement (internal self-government paired with an externally exercised protectorate and a continuing tribute) was already fully formed in an official Ceylon Government publication half a decade earlier. The treaty did not invent that architecture in 1887. It gave existing colonial reasoning the force of law.

It is worth being plain about what this does, and does not, make Bell. He did not negotiate the Protectorate, and this article does not suggest that he personally directed British policy toward the Maldives. His significance lies elsewhere. He supplied the colonial administration with one of its earliest comprehensive constitutional and strategic analyses of the archipelago, at a moment when Ceylon had almost none. Whether Appendix A was written as scholarship, as administration, or as both at once, it became part of the documentary environment within which the events of the following four years, and the decisions that followed them, took place. That is a narrower claim than authorship of the Protectorate. It is also, on the evidence assembled here, a claim the record actually supports.

The Archive That Left

There is a second, quieter extraction that the “great preserver” narrative has never had to answer for, and it can be checked today against the Sri Lanka National Archives’ own inventory of what is filed there as the Bell Collection, Record Group 25.16. It runs past three hundred entries, and reading it by category rather than by item number shows more clearly what actually left the country.

The first category is diplomatic correspondence: the Sultans’ letters to and from the Dutch Governors of Ceylon from 1670 to 1795, in the original and in translation, and the annual missives exchanged between Male’ and Colombo from 1796 to 1882. This was not merely correspondence. It was the evidentiary basis of Bell’s own constitutional argument in Appendix A, the paper trail from which he inferred a protectorate that did not yet legally exist. The very material he used to build that inference now sits, in the original, in the government archive of the power the inference favoured.

The second is palace record and Loamaafaanu, the copper-plate land grants that were the physical instruments of Maldivian state authority. Twelve original documents are catalogued simply as “Male’: Palace Loamaafaanu,” with a further nineteen from the Bodugalu Miskiy grant. These were not simply historical artefacts. A Loamaafaanu was a sovereign act in its own right, cut in copper in the name of a reigning Sultan, and removing the originals removed a category of evidence a Maldivian court might otherwise have consulted to settle its own questions of land and succession without reference to a colonial archive.

The third is royal chronicle and genealogy: drafts and transcripts of the Tarikh, the national record Bell’s own report describes as preserved “in the Sultan’s palace at Male’,” in which “all important events and matters of State have been faithfully noted for centuries”; the Raadhavalhi chronicles; complete genealogical tables of the Sultans; and the seals of the Sultans themselves, transcribed. Taken together, this is the documentary record of dynastic legitimacy, precisely the record a court would need to settle a succession dispute of the kind that convulsed Male’ in 1886.

The fourth is numismatic and material: photostat plates of Maldive coinage, two boxes of beads, notes and plates on the Maldivian flag, the 1932 constitution, census and revenue returns, and Bell’s own private diaries and correspondence, filed as though the archive of a foreign sovereign state were simply his working papers. Bell was franker about the coins than the catalogue lets on. In a footnote to his own numismatic notes, he mentions, almost in passing, “the collection in the writer’s own cabinet, dating from A.H. 1129 [A.D. 1716-17] to A.H. 1298 [A.D. 1880],” a personal hoard of Maldivian coinage spanning a hundred and sixty-four years of minting, gathered by a colonial officer and never returned.

None of this fits any definition of preservation that a Maldivian sovereign would recognise. What actually happened, across all four categories, was the transfer of an archipelago’s documentary and material patrimony into a colonial repository, catalogued under a British official’s name, in the capital of the very power that had just finished arguing, on paper, that the kingdom whose archive this was did not fully own itself. A nation cannot meaningfully hold its own history while the copper plates recording its own kings’ grants sit filed under someone else’s name, four hundred miles from where they were issued.

A Fourth Extraction: The Transfer of Historiographical Authority

The three extractions traced above concern sovereignty, governance and the physical record. There is a fourth, harder to document but no less real, and it concerns interpretive authority: the transfer not of documents but of the standing to explain what those documents mean. It is visible in the very act of gratitude with which this article began. When the National Centre for Linguistic and Historical Research reprinted Bell’s later monograph in 1985, it did not simply publish a source. It designated a British colonial officer’s synthesis as the primary lens through which “every Maldivian” would understand the nation’s own history, a designation made almost unavoidable by the fact that so much of the underlying primary material, the Tarikh, the Raadhavalhi, the palace Loamaafaanu, survives today chiefly in the transcriptions Bell carried to Colombo and catalogued under his own name.

This is a different kind of loss from the one traced in the section above. The removal of the originals was an archival extraction: documents changed location. The dependence of subsequent Maldivian historiography on Bell’s transcriptions, periodization and vocabulary, dependency, protectorate, semi-sovereignty, the very terms Appendix A supplied, is a historiographical extraction: interpretive authority changed hands. A document can, in principle, be returned. Recovering the capacity to narrate one’s own constitutional history without first passing through a colonial officer’s framework is a slower and less certain undertaking, and it is not obvious that the Maldives has yet completed it.

None of this is an argument for discarding Bell’s scholarship, which remains, whatever its origins, one of the fullest surviving windows onto the pre-1887 Maldivian state. It is an argument for reading it differently: as a primary source produced by an interested colonial administration, to be checked wherever possible against Maldivian sources that survive independently of the Bell Collection, rather than as a neutral secondary authority to be reprinted and cited without comment. That distinction, more than any single document recovered from Record Group 25.16, is what a genuine reappraisal of Maldivian historiography would require.

What 1965 Did Not Undo

None of this diminishes what Bell recorded, or the debt Maldivian historians genuinely owe a documentary record that might otherwise have been lost to fire, flood and the ordinary decay of manuscript on pandanus leaf. But debt and instrumentality are not opposites. A great deal of colonial knowledge production was useful and strategic at the same time, and pretending otherwise flatters the colonizer more than it honors the people who were being assessed. The same volume that catalogued coaling stations and fort walls also turned constitutional ambiguity into a ready-made protectorate theory, and a substantial share of the physical record of Maldivian statehood (grants, seals, chronicles, correspondence, coin) left the country in Bell’s custody and has, in the main, not returned.26 July 1965 undid a treaty. It did not undo an argument. That argument (that the Maldives was never quite sovereign enough to be left alone, that its wariness of foreign attention was an obstacle to be managed rather than a right to be respected) was drafted in 1883 by a man the nation has spent a hundred and forty years thanking without reading closely. The same pen, in the same volume, supplied the colonial administration with a constitutional and strategic framework through which Maldivian sovereignty was interpreted, only four years before that interpretation acquired formal legal expression in December 1887.

None of this requires an adversarial posture, and the practical path is better established than it might appear. Archives elsewhere have moved from exclusive former-colonial custody to joint stewardship without a single original changing hands: digitisation programmes that place high-resolution copies in both capitals, formal loan and co-curation agreements between national archives, and joint academic access schemes have all been used, in other post-colonial archival relationships, to separate the question of physical custody from the more basic question of who gets to consult, catalogue and interpret the material. None of these models requires the Sri Lanka National Archives to empty its shelves, and none of them is a novel proposal; they are the ordinary vocabulary of archival diplomacy between states once bound by unequal arrangements and no longer. What they require is a formal request from Malé, and a willingness on both sides to treat Record Group 25.16 as what it actually is: not a colonial officer’s private collection that happened to end up in a government archive, but the surviving state papers of a kingdom that has now been independent for sixty years and has never formally asked for them back.

The obvious next step, on an anniversary meant to mark what was recovered, is a plain one: a full accounting, and where warranted a formal claim, for the return (or at minimum the complete digitisation and joint custody) of everything still held under Record Group 25.16 in Colombo. Independence is not only the recovery of territory or diplomatic freedom; it is also the recovery of constitutional memory. A country cannot claim full independence while its own palace records remain catalogued in an archive that is not its own.

Sources

C. P. Bell, The Maldive Islands: An Account of the Physical Features, Climate, History, Inhabitants, Productions and Trade (Colombo: Frank Luker, Government Printer, Ceylon, 1883), Introduction (pp. i–iii), §III “Political Division” (“Defence,” pp. 16–17, and the Diego Garcia note, p. 20), §VIII “Money, Weights, and Measures” (pp. 120–121), and Appendix A “Political Status of the Sultan” (pp. 123–126).
National Centre for Linguistic and Historical Research, Foreword to H. C. P. Bell, The Maldive Islands: Monograph on the History, Archaeology and Epigraphy (Malé, 1985 reprint of Colombo, 1940).
Sri Lanka National Archives, “Items Taken by Bell from the Maldives, Catalogued at Sri Lanka Archive,” Bell Collection, Record Group 25.16.
The 1886–1888 succession (Sultan Ibrahim Nooraddeen’s reign dates and the accession of Muhammad Mueenuddeen II) and the broad terms of the 1887 Anglo-Maldivian Agreement are drawn from standard secondary accounts of the period. The account of the Great Fire of Male’ and the role attributed to Ibrahim Dhoshimeynaa Kaleygefaanu rests on Maldivian historical sources, as distinct from Bell’s 1883 report, which predates these events and does not address them.