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.