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

e-Con e-News 20-26 July 2025

‘If the country were turned into a giant hotel,
turned into a huge plantation,
turned into a large garment factory:
we would not need schools or universities,
for they require few modern skills…– SBD de Silva

The media is full of the most intricate yogic posturings to demonstrate the many ways by which our bodies can be twisted and bent over, hogtied and tongue-tied, to kneel down before the latest shenanigans of the USA and their killer poodles, the EU & England. Yet we often wonder how many professors or economists, repelled by the USA’s latest economic gunboat diplomacy, have conducted research to highlight the trajectory and ramifications of Sri Lanka’s inevitable political & economic separation from the USA, and/or the EU, and finally & most importantly, separate from England? To firmly locate us in the world where we live, in Asia, standing tall between Africa and China…

     Export, export, export, is all this media cry out, wail & scream, stating we must do whatever it takes to stay in the good graces of the imperialist beasts, whose jaws & appetites (markets) are to be desired. And no one dares study, let alone declare the necessity & consequences of weaning Sri Lanka off its deadly addiction to the old colonial import-export plantation fraud, while transforming ourselves into a modern industrial nation? Well, SBD de Silva certainly did. SB pointed out, the media do not even know what ‘modern’ & ‘industrial’ even really mean. Then again, why should they care?  It is increasingly apparent that the media – and the numerous foreign-government-funded Non-Government Organizations (FGNGOs) they readily and lavishly love to quote – are all run by a few foreign embassies in Colombo and Delhi, led by that extraterritorial blockhouse by seaside Kollupitiya junction. As for SBD, he rejected the notion that the export sector is ‘modern, progressive & advanced’; to expose this being one of the objectives of his monumental work.

     Oxford University wished to publish his 1962 London School of Economics (LSE) PhD thesis, but he held them off. A decade later, Oxford cried, ‘Nothing in this world is perfect’, but he still held them off. He in fact had come to reject the tenets underpinning his LSE thesis. The product of his rejection was The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (TPEU), published in 1982.  

     This ee continues serializing SBD de Silva’s classic, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment. Last week, SBD’s Preface detailed how social science has become a big business. He described the social nature of his personal motivations, to state his case, no matter the immediate profits or losses involved – for ‘knowledge has to be tested & developed through a process of confrontation’. One colleague, a famous Sri Lankan professor, told him to be careful, for he had too many references to Karl Marx! And his Australian Masters thesis supervisor, Professor HW Arndt told him, ‘Your book stands in contradistinction to everything we uphold.’ And yet, SB held fast to his beliefs to the very end, that the plantation system with its origins in chattel slavery could never set us free. And in this week’s reproduction of his ‘Introduction’, he delineates his objectives in writing the book, describing the shifting shapes of economists and economics, and the methods he had to use midst the erasure of evidence inside the country (see ee Focus).

     SBD always lamented the lack of an economic history of Sri Lanka. He had even sued Professor KM de Silva, who in his Oxford A History of Sri Lanka used SBD’s work without accreditation, while distorting his arguments. Anyway, history is supposedly being removed as a subject by the latest IMF- & merchant-authored educational reforms, and this should make the English very, very happy. The English too prevent their colonial, let alone their full internal, histories being taught, except to a select few, even in their own country. Yet, the English love of history – like a thief or murderer who worries they left incriminating fingerprints behind – becomes evident in the limited media exposé of their ‘Operation Legacy’, which demanded the burning by their high commissions abroad throughout the 1950s and 1960s, of any criminalizing evidence, files, etc, detailing their occidental despotism in our world.

     This hidden history, which SBD gathered by traversing the world over inside his book, is the history of a non-settler colonial nation, where a colonized class of merchants & moneylenders has failed to develop into a class dedicated to investing in modern production & accumulating capital. They instead keep the country underdeveloped as a spendthrift class of rentiers & consumers (like the ‘profligacy of the feudal aristocracy’ SBD’s Introduction refers to), whose rallying cry is ‘wine, women (or men), & song’….  One of SBD’s favourite questions about Sri Lanka’s oligarchs was: ‘What do the rich think rich means?’ 

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‘The University of Ceylon was recently moved

from the capital city of Colombo, where many

of its students could live at home & attend at

low social cost, and placed in beautiful but

expensive new buildings, 60 miles inland

in the country. The move symbolizes the

university as an institution removed from

& contemplative of the World,

not a part of the world & its problems…’

– Central Bank of Ceylon Deputy Governor

& US citizen, Theodore Morgan, 1956

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• The University of Peradeniya (referred to above) opened in 1952 (headed by ‘Sir’ Ivor Jennings, who also authored that 1947 ‘Constitution of Ceylon’) remains a fraud – from its bright beginnings, to when a disillusioned SBD de Silva quit teaching Economics there – to this day… The novelist Sena Thoradeniya recalls that the literature produced by Peradeniya has been tailored to fit the concept of colonial universities as expounded by its first Vice Chancellor Jennings. It was a literature of a minority where vast majorities were kept outside of it. Once again, a minority was riding roughshod over the majority, as the danger of dollar-hungry movements grew to dominate the literary, art and cultural fields. Thoradeniya in his Birth, Rise & Fall of The Peradeniya School of Literature (Peradeniya Gurukulaye Upatha, Nageema ha Bindaweteema, 2018), expresses a sensitive and controversial truth: In the fifties the university was filled with some village youth who were plagued with an inferiority complex. Within the campus there emerged a person who was capable of becoming their Messiah”. This was Ediriweera Sarachchandra (formerly Eustace Reginald De Silva). These youths came to see Sarachchandra as a great intellectual who could override the primordial rural culture they had inherited.” They sought to expunge the Sinhala Buddhist culture of their ancestors, as declared in Sarachchandra’s article, ‘Ascetic Ideal’. Sarachchandra, like the coterminous Sarvodhaya movement of AT Ariyaratne was also funded by the US Rockefeller (Exxon) Foundation. Though oil greased certain alienated ideas, it resolutely left out such questions as posed by DJ Wimalasurendra, whose vision for the country had been thwarted by this very same ‘Big Oil’ indeed. Sarachchandra eventually had to recant and go back to his roots to enrich his dramaturgy.

Perhaps the University of Peradeniya should be transformed into a cluster of technical colleges. We notice the university’s railway station, Sarasavi Uyana, is being refurbished, perhaps because many MPs in the almost-new NPP government hail from there? Indeed, the story of the destruction of the railway system, in order to promote the import of secondhand cars from Japan, is surely a story to be told. But the better question is, why do we graduate engineers who make no engines? The continuing colonial separation of arts & sciences is a luxury we can ill afford. Let alone the incessant droning about how education is being hijacked by those who wish to tie education to the needs of the economy, and oppose critical thinking. But, what kind of critical thinking does not think about how our economy will never properly employ people with dignity & skills, and why our merchants & moneylenders always oppose real modern development?

     SBD de Silva resigned from his post as a professor in the University of Peradeniya’s Economics Department, after he saw how the entire institution had been hijacked. Students had no interest in transforming a colonial import-export plantation economy into a modern society, where the university could be a manufacturer of manufacturers, inventor of inventors. Students, especially after 1977, were directed to obtain a scroll of white paper by any means, to exhibit their qualifications to hopefully get a sedentary day job. And not just them – look at the procession of abbreviated ‘qualifications’ behind some columnists’ names in the print media! Then again, SBD would report how teachers were holding private tuition classes in full view in Peradeniya town; or getting their wives & favorite students to mark papers. The hijacking of Peradeniya is not new. Right from its first foundation stone, there seems to have been little intention to strengthen the country’s real independence by educating about the realities of colonial underdevelopment and how to transform the society to overcome it, by ensuring a production culture…

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• If you happen to have Rs50,000 to spare for 2 hours, to buy a ticket into the Cinnamon Life Hotel’s Cumulus Ballroom in Colombo – and also get KPMG or Ernst & Young (E&Y) to write it off your tax bill – you can go hear ‘National University of Singapore Asia Research Institute Distinguished Fellow Prof Kishore Mahbubani’ wax on ‘Navigating the Asian Century – Opportunities & Risks for Sri Lanka’. The invitation for 30 July declares, ‘As Asia’s geopolitical & economic influence grows, Sri Lanka stands at a pivotal moment to redefine its role in the region.’ Risks indeed! Curiously, the talk (who says words are cheap?) is sponsored by the usual US thinktanks & fronts like the Chamber of Commerce, Advocata, Verite, LirneAsia. These ‘NGOs’ have been at the vanguard, vociferous in demanding that Sri Lanka sell off its national enterprises to the highest bidder. Let them tell state-centric Singapore (& China, whom the erudite Mahbubani has been relatively positive about) such nonsense, and these US thinktanks would be told to deport themselves ICE-quick to their sponsors on Washington’s Beltway!

     Will it be yet another lecture on how great Singapore is, and how rustic Sri Lanka is? One of SBD’s famous anecdotes was about Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) walking into a lecture hall filled with National University of Singapore (NUS) professors: Despite LKY’s entrance, they continue jabbering, horsing around & lounging about. He then yells at them, ‘I am the leader of this country, when I come in, you stand up!’ And they all go hush, and stand up meekly – and have done ever since, before every Singaporean leader, long after Lee joined his ancestors.

     Lee Kuan Yew & Singapore are ever tediously invoked in the media in Sri Lanka, especially when they wish to give us lectures on how lazy & tribal the Sinhala Buddhists are, and how the rule of law dominates in Singapore (except when it comes to harboring a criminal fugitive named Arjuna Mahendran!). Yet, few realize that there is no compare: Sri Lanka is a civilizational state of thousands of years, now dominated by merchants & moneylenders (led by the US World Bank). Singapore is a johnny-come-lately city-state, a strategically located rock (really!), minus its own water supply – but it also has a highly industrialized economy, with lucrative origins as an entrepot for England’s piratical opium trade from India, pushed through wars on China. Our media hacks don’t mention that Singapore has a mandatory policy of a Chinese majority, for as Lee Kuan Yew declared, if Indians dominate (as they do here!), the country will not progress…

     SBD de Silva was critical of academics who saw no link in their work to transforming the country’s economy. He, too, loved to quote Lee Kuan Yew, but not in the same obsequious manner as the media. He knew well Singapore’s history, having studied it and having taught there. He recalls LKY asking those very same academics on that fateful day of his grand entrance into the NUS: why so many years after Singapore’s ‘independence’ from Malaysia in 1965, had they not done any studies on the separation & its consequences? Singapore is very much dependent on the resources & markets of the rich Asian hinterland surrounding it. After all, even we still import oil from there – oil which sails past us from West Asia to be refined there before being sent here. We recall Singapore developed its refineries by providing refuelling facilities for the US bombers in the 1960-70s, on their way to murder millions and flatten Southeast Asia. We also recall that Boustead Bros, those monopoly importers of coal & oil & steel who undermined DJ Wimalasurendra’s plan for hydroelectrification, were based in Singapore – so that English colony still has a historical duty to keep undermining us. We assume Mahbubani has no such foul tendencies, even though we cannot say the same for the servile anti-national elements he will find himself thrown among…

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• This ee Focus also reproduces an excerpt from Kumari Jayawardena & Jennifer Moragoda’s book on their relative, NU Jayawardena, and his involvement in the famous 1934 Ceylon Banking Commission (CBC). It tells how the English banks refused to lend to, let alone hire, local people, and how they used Indian Chettiars & Afghans (Baluchis?) as middlemen. They mention the Bank of Ceylon (BoC) that arose from the CBC, but not how the BoC was subsequently hijacked.

     ee Focus also continues looking at the 19^th century New York political machine known as Tammany Hall: how the rulers of that famed ‘Metropolis of America’ used violence and rigged elections, selling the spoils of office; how they were great supporters of chattel slavery in the South. It also describes how their system of so-called democracy gave rise to the ‘big man’ in politics, and the demagoguery we see today, oft times camouflaged, sometimes openly, strutting across the world stage, whether it be an Obama, a Biden or a Trump…

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Contents:

Should the University of Peradeniya be Closed Down?