e-Con e-News

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‘Before you study the economics, study the economists!’

e-Con e-News 017-23 March 2024

The USA is now naming Sri Lanka as a ‘partner’ in its Indo-Pacific wars. US military magazine Indo-Pacific Defense Forum recently outlined the US Indo-Pacific Command’s planned ‘military engagements’ for Sri Lanka.

     The US Navy earlier established a logistics hub to support US warships operating in our ocean called Indian – this was revealed immediately after Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court, under sweeteners and pressures from US-funded politicians & NGOS, overturned then-President Maithripala Sirisena’s dissolution of parliament and removal of then-PM Ranil Wickremesinghe, on 7 December 2018 (see ee Quotes).

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     The earliest US navies were involved in trafficking enslaved Africans, then demanding ‘equal opportunity’ in the English opium trade imposed on China. The US Marine Corps were first set up to wage war on North Africa (they called the ‘Barbary States’) to protect US opium trafficked through the Mediterranean, from Turkey to China.

     The US navy was also involved in abolishing the import of slaves from Africa, but only to create scarcity and raise the price of slaves, because the US had escalated horrific slave-breeding camps inside the US – an early exercise in sanctions aiding import substitution.

States like Maryland & Virginia, which formerly employed slaves

on the production of export articles [were transformed]

into states which raised slaves in order

to export these slaves into the deep South.

– Karl Marx, in Vienna’s Die Presse, 25 October 1861

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The laziness of the Sinhala worker is still a common theme in the capitalist media, especially when comparing them to the imposition of Indian laborers on Sri Lanka. Yet, ‘the Sinhala villager was not averse to wage labor’, observed SBD de Silva, ‘they were opposed to plantation bondage’.

     This ee traces the revolution and evolution of such slavish practices shaping corporate ‘human resources’ and the ideas of economists & economics in Sri Lanka. Indeed, the ‘most profoundly cherished ideals & beliefs’ in the North Atlantic world, eg, ‘liberalism’ (Englishman John Locke, so-called Father of Liberalism, was involved in the slave trade) & ‘neoliberalism’, have been shaped by enslavement & colonialism. Also, the so-called bourgeois science of ‘economics’ as promoted by the media’s ‘economists’ has been shaped by these slave practices to this very day.

     And just as we hear now of how much corporations wish to promote ‘gender equality’ etc, we recall that the 1868 US law declaring Africans as ‘human’ in the US was passed in order to declare corporations as humans too!

     It is also hilarious that US ‘NGO’ EconomyNext keeps claiming how neoliberals were opposed to slavery and to ‘apartheid’ South Africa.  It is blatantly untrue. So-called neoliberals have always opposed the independence of the ‘colonies,’ and in fact many of their supposedly common-sense economics are actually a translation of white supremacist demands!  

‘He distilled the question of membership in ‘the West’

down to the quantifiable figure of how much interest

the nation would have to pay to borrow money.

The most pertinent criterion was not cultural, ideological,

or geographic, but lay in investor confidence’

(see ee Focus, The Role of Economists

in the White Atlantic’s War on the World)

• The English slave system in the Americas is very much linked to corporate labor relations in Sri Lanka, as promoted in the tea plantations, overseen by 1,000s of Indian kanganies who recruited these workers by devious means, and now represent the Indian worker in parliament too!

     This ‘kangany’ bondage’ like chattel slavery in the Americas was first transferred from the North Atlantic to Asia due to the world’s first successful slave revolution, in Haiti (& it’s no coincidence that the US, Canada & France are planning to invade Haiti again!). This chattel slavery was transformed into indentured slavery in Asia and practiced on Asians transported to Indian & Pacific Oceans, and to the Americas, then to the wage-labor conditions enacted in Sri Lanka. This has infected & infiltrated the mind & body politics & economics in Sri Lanka. SBD de Silva discussed all this in his classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment in his chapter on ‘Problems of labor supply & the recourse to migrant labor: The response of indigenous labor to the plantation system’.

     As a qualifier, ee also reproduces Stephen Joseph Scott’s ‘Governance, Race, Property, & Profit’, which looks at white supremacism & liberalism’s more specific origins in Barbados. And yet to this very day, the media continues to ignore how much of the ‘human resource’ aka ‘personnel’ practices emanate from there. Indeed, many of the top corporations in Sri Lanka (with Unilever in the lead) maybe traced to the early agency houses established under this slave system.

     In 1840: English slaver Robert Boyd Tytler arrived in Lanka bringing his ‘expertise’ in the ‘West India System’ of coffee planting in Jamaica. He brought a copy of Pierre Joseph Laborie’s Coffee Planter of Santo Domingo (1798) which became the authority on ‘plantation development,’ excerpting book extracts in Ceylon Miscellany Vol 2 (1842).

     Laborie, who fled Haiti (aka Santo Domingo), recommended: ‘Punishments must be certain, immediately inflicted, proportionable to the fault, and never excessive. Racks, tortures, mayhems, mutilations, and death are reserved for crimes of an atrocious nature, and fall only within the province of the public magistrate: through perhaps more speedy executions, and particularly on the spot, would have more striking effect.’

     In 1863: Coffee Planter of Santo Domingo (1798) reprinted in Lanka with the preface: ‘Laborie, though an old writer, is still the authority on all that relates to Coffee planting. The principles laid down by him so many years ago in the West Indies, are those which still guide the managers of Ceylon properties.’

     Indeed, there is no rush to produce an economic history of Sri Lanka for this very reason. For it would expose the slavish origins of many of our (predominantly ‘minority’) merchant leaders to this day. This is why it is most important to examine carefully and write the history of our villages, especially those who produce wage workers for the Western Province.

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• Dumbara beyond Colombo’s English Mists & Myths

‘Returning to Kandy in 1949 Minnette de Silva set up practice, away from Colombo

but at the heart of traditional Lanka – the home of lacquer work,

Dumbara mats and religious & feudal architecture’

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‘The Hilton pays homage to the country’s culturally rich heritage with

Dumbara-inspired motifs, a nod to the country’s traditional weaving craftmanship’

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‘Clothing & accessories made from traditional crafts

such as Dumbara weaving, Beeralu lace, batik’

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The Dumbara Valley in the central highlands of Sri Lanka is inextricably and umbilically linked with ‘the hereditary craft of textile weaving’. At least, in the minds of the ruling denizens of the country. These minds rarely venture south, east & north out of that constipated suburb of London (& now NY) known as Colombo, and if they do, it’s only to ensure their cut of the tea plucked, rubber tapped, coconuts husked, graphite mined, & garments assembled, then exported, along with workers….after all these commodities have, of course, been duly hanged, dried, quartered & calculated.

     Dumbara usually recalls some motif, some weave they may step on, or some cloth they may exotically incarcerate their bodies in, to claim some occasional fashion, a sarong or a scarf, to scale some sartorial bridge to the dominant though repressed national culture – the Barefoot School of faux adoration & patronization of handicrafts, who the children of this valley appear to be in no hurry to inherit. This Colombo has little idea of the role that the people of this quantum of geography have played and still play in the drama of all our lives.

     Enter stage left then is Sinhala critic & award-winning novelist Sena Thoradeniya’s latest oeuvre Dumbara Rata: Vol I, published last week.This seminal work on Dumbara consists of 4 volumes, and if we dare measure this initial salvo by its cover, it indeed promises to unleash grand fireworks of what he ventures as ‘a new field of study – Kandyan Affairs’. The Kandyan Kingdom aka Sinhale spread to all corners of the country… (see ee Random Notes)

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Contents:

US Slavery & Origins of Merchant Capitalism in Sri Lanka