The Mahavamsa, the great chronicle compiled in Pali from the fifth century onward and continued for a thousand years afterwards, is the tradition's own history, and it does two things at once. It records the arrival of Buddhism with Mahinda in the third century BCE, the planting of the bodhi tree cutting at Anuradhapura, and the succession of kings and monastic lineages, and it presents the island as the appointed home of the teaching. Wilhelm Geiger's translation made it available to European scholarship.
Colonial rule under the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British disadvantaged Buddhism for three centuries, and the response, from the later nineteenth century, was a revival that reorganised it. Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist Theosophical Society founded schools, printed texts and argued in public debates against missionaries, and the movement gave Buddhism institutions modelled on those of its opponents.
That revival was also nationalist, and the connection has had consequences. Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, drawing on the chronicle's framing of the island, has been a factor in the country's modern conflicts, including the civil war that ran from 1983 to 2009. The atlas records this because the relation between a scripture, a chronicle and a modern politics is part of the religion's history rather than a departure from it.