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

e-Con e-News 22-28 June 2025

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‘Tell the old lady [Sirimavo Bandaranaike] that some prophet

who also thinks that he is the father of the industrial revolution

in Sri Lanka believes that he can produce all the mammoties

we need in some smithy in Kotmale’ – Brian Senanayake,

 Senior Assistant Secretary under Minister of Industries TB Subasinghe,

to his cousin MDD Peiris, Secretary

to the Prime Minister, quoted in Peiris’ autobiography

In Pursuit of Governance

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‘Difficult songs find few singers’

– Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei

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Here is a torrid tale of how England has had the monopoly over making mammoties in Sri Lanka. Even though, if you stop even now, or stopped even then (in 1974, when this anecdote unreels) any English man or woman on a dank London Street, and ask or asked them, then as now: what on earth a mammoty is? ­– they certainly wouldn’t know this ‘English’ word, let alone care to know. They may even think it an obscenity. The English farmer uses or used a spade, which uses the weight of their body to unearth the wintry hard soil, that is, until they were replaced by machines. The Sinhala farmer seemed to prefer the swinging motion of the mammoty, that perhaps keeps them in shape for other activity.

     Yet, someone in that Bandaranaike government of 1970-77 had decided it was time for Sri Lanka to make its own farming implements. Yet others thought it was still not the right time. And we wondered who they, pro & con, could have been?

     The Sunday Island has been faithfully excerpting MDD Peries’ memoirs. This mammoty episode unfolds around 1974, in the midst of worldwide famines, the skyrocketing of fuel & food prices, and the usual ‘shortage’ of foreign exchange.

     The Chillington Company of England has been producing this ‘Crocodile’ brand mammoty, since 1876. It has gained a prickly reputation for suing any local attempt to make it here. The Chillington brand, recalls Peiris nostalgically, ‘was extremely popular with our farming community, particularly the paddy farmers’. And Peiris was skeptical about attempts ‘being made to produce it locally under license by the State Hardware Corporation’.

Yet as one erudite ee reader has already recalled:

‘The State Hardware Corp produced very good mammoties.

Kotmale produced steel products under Workers’ Councils.

Kotmale was famous for smiths & smithies. The tradition goes

back to a fugitive Gamunu from Rohana. If developed as envisaged,

Kotmale could have developed as Sheffield, Jamshedpur, Shanghai,

paving the way for an industrial resurgence.’

The Secretary to the PM, MDD Peries however is somewhat derisive:

‘We also needed to import a certain number annually.

However there also was at this time a doctrinaire

anti-import lobby who fervently believed that we could

produce good quality mammoties in the forges of Kotmale.’

Peries blames ‘the vociferousness of this lobby’ that led ‘to the government hesitating to place orders for the import of the ‘Crocodile’ mammoty, pending a study’, yet appears to make a valid point (reminiscent of the recent ‘organic fertilizer’ fiasco):

‘There now arose a possibility of a serious shortage of good

quality mammoties, when land preparation for the sowing

of the main Maha paddy crop was drawing near.’

Let’s try to figure out who on earth constituted this ‘doctrinaire’ ‘vociferous lobby’? And even more, who this putative ‘father of the industrial revolution in Sri Lanka’ could have been? And how these ‘serious shortages’ are stage-managed? There’s no proof, but we have no doubt that Peiris’ cousin Brian Senanayake is referring to no one other than SBD de Silva. After all, SBD was a Director of Industrial Policy & Economic Research at the Ministry, and later Secretary to Minister of Industries & Scientific Affairs TB Subasinghe.

     Peiris’ prose flows mellifluous, and his memoirs are usually a pleasure to read. Yet he appears to lose his cool here. His recollections usually portray himself as an unflappable heir to the traditions of the purportedly even-handed English civil service. Yet one gets the sense, that he’s also doing his best to maintain decorum midst the rise of the rule of the darker yakos after 1948.

     Peiris’ recall is to be envied, and his anecdotes are indeed compelling and endearing, but there is a strange vacuity about the urgency of national production, epitomized in his rendition of this mammoty moment. Here is his ‘cousin’ who is working as Senior Assistant Secretary to the Ministry of Industries under Minister TB Subasinghe, and an ‘assistant’ to SB, urgently calling him up to get him to warn the PM:

‘The message was very clear. I briefed the Prime Minister.

Regretfully, I could not quote the original text of the message.

Mammoties were ordered, but by the time they arrived some delay

was caused and the newspapers were full of the shortage of mammoties.’

Why are the newspapers never ‘full’ about the need for modern industrialization? Can we deduce any positive identification from such a stray gratuitous comment broadcast in the media, made by one senior bureaucrat to another? A comment which displays the continuity of the ‘permanent government’, run by the so-called civil service inherited from the colonial machinery.

     This anecdote illustrates not just the family connections and class interests shared between senior members of the ‘civil service’ and bureaucracy. It is clear Senanayake knew his plaint would resonate with his dear cousin Peries, who indeed was fully in accord with his concerns.

     SBD would later write about the downright ingenuity of the sabotage that any attempt at industrialization must withstand. SBD de Silva, anyway, in 1974 was about to be targeted again as a ‘communist’ and forced to resign. ‘A doctrinaire anti-import lobby!’ indeed.

     May we conclude that Peiris & Senanayake were part of the ‘permanent’ ‘opposition’ embedded in the bureaucracy? ‘Doctrinaire’ enemies to any real change in the colonial import-export plantation economy, a quarter of a century after so-called independence?

‘The growing intervention of governments in the affairs

of private business makes it entrepreneurially helpful for

the large, invariably expatriate firms to keep the goodwill

of politicians, and to take on to their staff bureaucrats

whose contacts established during their service

with the government’ are invaluable to the firms,

in their dealings with government over foreign

exchange licences, raw material allocations, pricing,

taxation, & matters pertaining to foreign investments.’

– SBD de Silva, Political Economy of Underdevelopment

However, it also does not mean that the pro-industrialization ‘lobby’ has been fully aware of the challenges, political, technical and military, they would face, that only a Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong could overcome. ‘92% of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) payments still go to the global north (see ee Economists). As for SBD being ‘the father’, we should be clearer. While ee has tried to record Sri Lanka’s many attempts and failures to industrialize, pointing to those like DJ ‘Laxapana’ Wimalasurendra, to Philip Gunawardena & GVS de Silva & William de Silva, to TB Illangaratne, who worked tirelessly to industrialize the country, despite vehement & vicious & deadly opposition, it is SBD de Silva in his book The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (PEU) who examined and crystalized those efforts, recognizing: that modern ‘machine-making’ industrialization is more than dainty handicraft, more than assembly & manufacture. He saw that such an industrial revolution would require many fathers and mothers. And as ee keeps jabbering, requires the ‘manufacture of manufacturers’, the ‘invention of inventors’ – yes, modern industrialization…

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Indeed – ‘Difficult songs find few singers.’ And SBD de Silva penned difficult songs. And perhaps few can sing what SBD conjured. His song is not a melody that Mr. Maharajah’s MTV and other merchant media bestow superstar celebrity status on, multiplying mindless memes ten-thousand-fold. His reverberating vibes were about the need to industrially transform a colonial import-export plantation economy, and to thus build a powerful modern country, not remain a beggar who must endure the ‘shithole’ sermons from genocidal maniacs.

     The quotable quote about ‘difficult songs find few singers’ comes from a recent interview with Chinese tech provider Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei. Ren is evoking those researchers who undertake challenging tasks in awesome conditions. And this is what SBD undertook. Whereas the media largely runs scared of SB’s ideas, Ren’s interview made the front page of People’s Daily, the premier Communist Party of China medium (see ee Focus):

Q: Facing external blockades & pressure,

encountering many difficulties, what are your thoughts?

A: I haven’t thought about it – thinking about it is useless.

Don’t think about difficulties

– just get on & do it, and move forward step by step

…Praise brings pressure.

A bit of scolding keeps us clearheaded.’

Huawei’s Ren seems to shrug off (as any real leader would) the attempts by the US & Europe to hobble China’s rise – through political, industrial as well as military means. He singles out ‘the importance of basic research to long-term competitiveness’. The interviewers point out that US economists themselves have noted ‘the US lacks a high‑speed rail system because capitalism demands immediate individual profit’, whereas ‘China’s socialist approach values social benefit: high‑speed rail, heavy‑haul lines, advanced power grids, expressways, rural infrastructure.’

     Yet, while Ren’s enterprise now invents newer & sexier communication tools, SBD’s attempts toward Sri Lanka, even making a simple farm implement, were blocked. SB’s musical notes & instrumental notions are after all not that very different nor more difficult than Ren’s – for they are common sense. SBD’s words seek to make us stand up, midst squalls threatening to knock us over and drown us if we do not learn to navigate storms more deadly than we have had to endure for centuries, located as we are in another increasingly raucous intersection of the world. Yet, if we take the time & effort to listen, to read carefully, we’d appreciate how deeply intricate & rich are SBD de Silva’s analyses & arguments & prognoses. Their difficulty lies in getting the actions & accompanying words to resonate in the real world, midst the seemingly overwhelming and diverting din & dance of the usurious merchant hegemon and their sponsors.

     And while there is still much chatter about our ‘Asiatic’ despotism (resonant in the numerous delegations of genocidal warmongers calling on us savages to ‘reconcile’ & make ‘peace’…) let’s recall the great Guinea-Bissau leader Amilcar Cabral’s axiom, that the role of the person with the weapon, is to protect the person with the tool. We well recall that the Portuguese, the Dutch & the English first attacked our smithies, and then our waterways (the material basis of the purana village solidarity) and fields. We can bear witness to the studious dedication of the imperialists to the destruction of the artisanal class that must make up the liberatory proletariat, with our ‘foreign employment’ agents ever ready to pack them off to servitude in distant lands.

     Again: as Secretary to the Ministry of Industries & Scientific Affairs in 1974, SBD de Silva had to fend off the ingenious merchant sabotage of the policies he recommended. He also learned how weak the Sri Lankan state’s tools and weapons were, and still are, let alone our understanding of what true industrialization entails – he concluded it requires a political, economic & military policy. And now we get to witness again yet another government having to contend with the so-called ‘black economy’ of mafias, cartels, etc.

     Yet, in truth this ‘black economy’ is as ‘white’ as ever, for these saboteurs are a front for the so-called ‘Free Market’, monopolized by European (& their settler) multinational banks & corporations, who are the main opponents of our countries’ modern advance. Which makes us wonder, whatever happened to that League of Multinational Corporations (LMNC), led by Unilever, which was inaugurated in 2018, crying out, ‘Everything needs to be fixed’ in Sri Lanka? And, why do they appear so quiet, at least in this ‘sunlit’ media they sponsor?

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‘The ownership & control of the foreign enterprises

in the nonsettler colonies were held by powerful corporations

abroad. Their sources of economic power lay outside the country

of investment & therefore out of reach of the newly independent

governments. The ramifications of such external control extend

over the whole of the colonial export economy including the financing,

marketing & sale of plantation or mining products, & its roots

are not easy to unravel let alone exterminate.’

– SBD de Silva, PEU

The League of Multinational Corporations (LMNC) in Sri Lanka, was formed in 2018 by seven MNCs: Unilever, Ceylon Tobacco Company (CTC, i.e., British American Tobacco), Baur & Co, Heineken, HSBC, Indian Oil Co, and Mastercard. These powerful MNCs, with war chests bigger than most countries’ budgets, demanded of Sri Lanka: ‘Everything needs to be fixed in the context of international standards, in terms of human rights & labor laws too.’ And ‘fixing’, as in fraud, is surely what they do best!

     For SBD, industrialization was not just trading (‘take a walk along the pavement & see what’s on sale, and where & how it is made’) or assembly (like the ‘garment’ fraud that refuses to make a pin), handicraft (plucking tea seems hands personified alright!) or manufacture (primitive production), but ultimately modern industry (the making of machines). But how to get there (where one thing leads to another) was & is the question?

     MDD Peiris’ naivete or ignorance is epitomized in the recent excerpts of his memoirs, of his rendition of a trip to the USA to learn about wheat, then later mentioning the imposition of that great Japanese-Singaporean fraud called Prima Flour. He seems not to have been taken to where the latest agricultural machineries were being designed and produced, or the industrial-agricultural colleges. Instead, he is introduced to the marketing side of the food chain…

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‘Without basic research, you plant no roots. & without roots,

even trees with lush leaves fall at the first wind’

Huawei’s Ren (see ee Focus) offers sheer cool in the face of imperialist opposition to China’s industrial rise. He also gives examples of scientists & artists (are they different quantities, really?) who work almost underground & unsung, doing ‘basic research’ that may never see the light of day, for decades or even centuries to come. SBD de Silva was indeed a basic researcher, and his aria arrayed the uncovering of the political and economic roots of Sri Lanka’s disquiet, with examples from around the world, when the evidence at home was scant or missing.

     There have been those who criticized SBD for not writing or translating his important work into Sinhala. But first he had to gather the evidence, which was mostly in English and put it all together. On the other hand, those who criticized him never sought to explain or extend his work in Sinhala. They were too busy stimulating their acolytes with the psychoanalytic postmodernisms of French theory, that has failed to liberate the French themselves from their murderous metier and libidinal neuroses – ‘postmodern’ theories, which were a US-state-financed ideological attack on Marxism-Leninism, etc, the praxis that has made China ‘great’ again.

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‘The rigorous curtailment of Western education

[in the settler colonies] was in contrast to the

educational policy in nonsettler colonies – eg, India,

Sri Lanka, Malaysia, & the West Indies – where

Westernization & Western education were deliberately fostered.’

We were dangerously diverted last week by the deadly war games & media hype of the imperialist powers & their ‘running dogs’ (there’s a phrase we haven’t heard in a while, but it sure fits Ukraine & Israel, Germany & Japan, etc), from marking more fully the 7^th anniversary of the passing of SBD de Silva, and his formidable legacy.

     This week saw repeated hype about the World Bank’s $50million dollar loan for ‘education’, which will supposedly benefit ‘500,000-students & 150,000 teachers’. Wow! The hijacking & bribing of the Ministry of Education & its officials, recalls the different forms of education permitted in the different types of colonies, discussed in Chapter 6 of SBD’s classic work, on ‘Settler growth & the repression of indigenous interests’, which ee begins this week (see ee Focus). Here, SBD goes into further detail of the different economic policies of nonsettler colonies such as Sri Lanka and the settler colonies, as well as the white ‘dominions’. See how the media goes on about the need for ‘exports’ all the time – which SB notes is a feature of such colonies of ours – whereas settlers ‘generally catered for domestic or regional markets’.

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• In these days of municipal horse trading, ee continues looking into that famed New York ‘charity’ – the political machine called Tammany Hall, and its role in fixing ‘democracy’ to divide the ‘spoils’ of urban political office: where ‘the control of the police force was considered as necessary as ever to success at the election’ and ‘political & pecuniary reasons alone guided the appointment of policemen’ such that ‘the police being so disorganized, the criminal classes ran the town’. We find it interesting however that there is almost no reference by Gustavus Myers, author of the 1917 History of Tammany Hall, to the larger political and economic forces that ruled that country at that time.

     Which is why it’s so enlightening to hear this week (see ee Economists) about the historian Gerald Horne’s latest work, The Capital of Slavery: Washington DC 1800-65. He is not just referring to a municipality but to the ‘international’ business of buying & selling people: The USA, at that same time as Myer’s tale, was involved in the wholesale kidnapping of people from Africa and breeding more, and selling them not just to their southern cotton penitentiaries, but also to the European colonies of the Caribbean (Cuba, etc) and the rest of the Americas (Brazil, the last country in the Western Hemisphere where slavery was abolished, only in 1888), and their extension to the Pacific (Hawaii) and Asia (the Philippines, in particular). As noted last week, the settler colonies & the white dominions truly believe they are success stories – regardless of their horrors then & now – and see their model as desirous of replication. They badly need to be disabused of such fairy tales, and history is on its way toward doing just that…

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Contents:

Father of the Modern Industrial Revolution in Sri Lanka