Colonial Mixed Blood

COLONIAL MIXED BLOOD

The navies built by the Arabs and King Solomon plied the oceans long ago. The Portuguese, Dutch, and British followed suit, and eventually the oceans were mastered. The colonial age came into being and brought with it increased movements of people and the mixing of genes.

In Colonial Mixed Blood, author Allan Russell Juriansz, who was born in Sri Lanka, provides an account of this occurrence with reference to the Portuguese, Dutch, and British who colonized Sri Lanka for the period of the past five hundred years. The story begins in Riga, Latvia, in the late 1400s and centres on the Ondatjes and the Juriansz clan, their love story, their immersion in Christianity, and their struggles to survive the forces of colonialism and find happiness.

A blend of history and fiction, Colonial Mixed Blood provides a background of the religious forces at work during this time in Europe and outlines the genealogy and life experiences of Juriansz’s family as part of the colonial activity of the Dutch East India Company in Sri Lanka. They inherited an adventurous spirit from their first Dutch ancestors, and this spirit inspired their diaspora. But it was one hundred and fifty years of intense British influence that transformed them into loyal British subjects.