This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Reported death figures for the 1915 riots range in the secondary literature from the twenties into the low hundreds, mixing rioters, bystanders and those killed by the police and military forces sent to restore order, against several more executed afterward under martial law. Blackton's reconstruction, built from the colonial government's own records, concentrates on the riots' course and the martial law response rather than compiling one total, and no later academic study has produced a reconciled figure; this atlas records the toll as unknown. Property destruction, several thousand Muslim owned buildings damaged or destroyed, is by contrast comparatively well documented.
Governor Chalmers described the underlying antagonism as a combination of creed and purse, and historians including Blackton and Michael Roberts read the riots as Sinhala Buddhist resentment expressed through religious symbolism, the contested procession past a mosque, but substantially aimed at the Muslim community's commercial success. Religious identity supplied both the trigger and the line along which the violence was organized, even where economic grievance supplied much of its underlying force, a reading the colonial government's own subsequent treatment of the martial law executions as a distinct and separate injustice does nothing to unsettle.