The late 1970s civil war in Sri Lanka left the country in an almost permanent state of crisis. Conventional histories of the country by liberal and Marxist scholars in the last twenty years have thus tended to focus on the state's failure to accommodate the needs and demands of the minorities. The entire history of the twentieth century has been traced to this one key issue. Sri Lanka in the Modern Age offers a fresh perspective based on new research. Above all, Nira Wickramasinghe has written a history of the people of Sri Lanka rather than a history of the nation-state.