{"id":141153,"date":"2024-03-26T13:26:25","date_gmt":"2024-03-26T20:26:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=141153"},"modified":"2024-03-26T13:26:25","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T20:26:25","slug":"us-slavery-origins-of-merchant-capitalism-in-sri-lanka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2024\/03\/26\/us-slavery-origins-of-merchant-capitalism-in-sri-lanka\/","title":{"rendered":"US Slavery & Origins of Merchant Capitalism in Sri\u00a0Lanka"},"content":{"rendered":"

e-Con e-News<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n
\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

blog: eesrilanka.wordpress.com<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Before you study the economics, study the economists!<\/em>\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

e-Con e-News 017-23 March 2024<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The USA is now naming Sri Lanka as a \u2018partner<\/em>\u2019 in its Indo-Pacific wars. <\/strong>US military magazine <\/strong>Indo-Pacific Defense Forum<\/em> recently outlined the US Indo-Pacific Command\u2019s planned \u2018military engagements\u2019 for Sri Lanka.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     The US Navy earlier established a logistics hub to support US warships<\/strong> operating in our ocean called Indian \u2013 this was revealed immediately after Sri Lanka\u2019s Supreme Court, under sweeteners and pressures from US-funded politicians & NGOS, overturned then-President Maithripala Sirisena\u2019s dissolution of parliament and removal of then-PM Ranil Wickremesinghe, on 7 December 2018 (see ee Quotes<\/em><\/strong>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     The earliest US navies<\/strong> were involved in trafficking enslaved Africans<\/strong>, then demanding \u2018equal opportunity\u2019 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 \u2018Barbary States\u2019) to protect US opium trafficked through the Mediterranean, from Turkey to China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     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<\/strong>, because the US had escalated horrific slave-breeding camps<\/strong> inside the US \u2013 an early exercise in sanctions aiding import substitution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

States like Maryland & Virginia, which formerly employed slaves<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

on the production of export articles [were transformed]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

into states which raised slaves in order<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

to export these slaves into the deep South.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Karl Marx, in Vienna\u2019s Die Presse<\/em>, 25 October 1861<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>The laziness<\/em><\/strong> 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, \u2018the Sinhala villager was not averse to wage labor\u2019, observed SBD de Silva, \u2018they were opposed to plantation bondage<\/strong>\u2019.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

     This ee<\/em><\/strong> traces the revolution and evolution of such slavish practices shaping corporate \u2018human resources\u2019 and the ideas of economists & economics in Sri Lanka. Indeed, the \u2018most profoundly cherished ideals & beliefs\u2019 <\/em>in the North Atlantic world, eg, \u2018liberalism<\/em>\u2019 (Englishman John Locke, so-called Father of Liberalism<\/em>, was involved in the slave trade) & \u2018neoliberalism<\/em>\u2019, have been shaped by enslavement & colonialism. Also, the so-called bourgeois science of \u2018economics\u2019 as promoted by the media\u2019s \u2018economists\u2019 has been shaped by these slave practices to this very day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     And just as we hear now of how much corporations wish to promote \u2018gender equality\u2019 etc, we recall that the 1868 US law declaring Africans as \u2018human\u2019 in the US was passed in order to declare corporations<\/em><\/strong> as humans<\/strong> too!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

     It is also hilarious that US \u2018NGO\u2019 EconomyNext<\/em> keeps claiming how neoliberals were opposed to slavery and to \u2018apartheid\u2019 South Africa.  It is blatantly untrue. So-called neoliberals have always opposed the independence of the \u2018colonies,\u2019 and in fact many of their supposedly common-sense economics are actually a translation of white supremacist demands!  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018He distilled the question of membership in \u2018the West\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

down to the quantifiable figure of how much interest<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

the nation would have to pay to borrow money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most pertinent criterion was not cultural, ideological,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

or geographic, but lay in investor confidence\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

(see ee Focus<\/em><\/strong>, The Role of Economists<\/p>\n\n\n\n

in the White Atlantic\u2019s War on the World)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     This \u2018kangany\u2019 bondage\u2019 like chattel slavery in the Americas was first transferred from the North Atlantic to Asia due to the world\u2019s first successful slave revolution, in Haiti (& it\u2019s 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<\/strong> discussed all this in his classic The Political Economy of Underdevelopment<\/em> in his chapter on \u2018Problems of labor supply & the recourse to migrant labor: The response of indigenous labor to the plantation system\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     As a qualifier, ee <\/em><\/strong>also reproduces Stephen Joseph Scott\u2019s \u2018Governance, Race, Property, & Profit<\/strong>\u2019, which looks at white supremacism & liberalism\u2019s more specific origins in Barbados. And yet to this very day, the media continues to ignore how much of the \u2018human resource\u2019 aka \u2018personnel\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     In 1840: English slaver Robert Boyd Tytler arrived in Lanka bringing his \u2018expertise\u2019 in the \u2018West India System\u2019 of coffee planting in Jamaica. He brought a copy of Pierre Joseph Laborie\u2019s Coffee Planter of Santo Domingo<\/em> (1798) which became the authority on \u2018plantation development,\u2019 excerpting book extracts in Ceylon Miscellany<\/em> Vol 2 (1842).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Laborie, who fled Haiti (aka Santo Domingo), recommended: \u2018Punishments must be certain, immediately inflicted, proportionable to the fault, and never excessive. Racks, tortures, mayhems, mutilations, and death<\/strong> 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.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     In 1863: Coffee Planter of Santo Domingo<\/em> (1798) reprinted in Lanka with the preface: \u2018Laborie, 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.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Indeed, there is no rush to produce an economic history of Sri Lanka<\/strong> for this very reason. For it would expose the slavish origins of many of our (predominantly \u2018minority\u2019) 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Dumbara beyond Colombo\u2019s English Mists & Myths<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Returning to Kandy in 1949 Minnette de Silva set up practice, away from Colombo<\/p>\n\n\n\n

but at the heart of traditional Lanka \u2013 the home of lacquer work,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dumbara mats and religious & feudal architecture\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018The Hilton pays homage to the country\u2019s culturally rich heritage with<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dumbara-inspired motifs, a nod to the country\u2019s traditional weaving craftmanship\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Clothing & accessories made from traditional crafts<\/p>\n\n\n\n

such as Dumbara weaving, Beeralu lace, batik\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Dumbara Valley in the central highlands of Sri Lanka is inextricably and umbilically linked with \u2018the hereditary craft of textile weaving\u2019. 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\u2019s only to ensure their cut of the tea plucked, rubber tapped, coconuts husked, graphite mined, & garments assembled, then exported, along with workers\u2026.after all these commodities have, of course, been duly hanged, dried, quartered & calculated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

     Enter stage left then is Sinhala critic & award-winning novelist Sena Thoradeniya\u2019s <\/strong>latest oeuvre Dumbara Rata: Vol I<\/em><\/strong>, published last week.This seminal work on Dumbara <\/em>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 \u2018a new field of study \u2013 Kandyan Affairs\u2019. The Kandyan Kingdom aka Sinhale spread to all corners of the country\u2026 (see ee Random Notes<\/em><\/strong>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contents:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
US Slavery & Origins of Merchant Capitalism in Sri Lanka<\/a><\/blockquote>