The article addresses social exclusion as a historical process in Sri Lanka’s relations with the Western world. The ethnographic starting point of this study is Sri Lanka’s tourist space, and the issues it deals with are the origins of social exclusion, which are at the centre of the discourse on tourist development in the postcolonial world and capitalist world system. These ideas have generated numerous consequences, which at first glance appear to be Sri Lanka’s internal problems; in reality, however, they are inseparably linked with the New World Order, which affects all the inhabitants of our planet in one way or another.