“How Rubber Shaped our Political Philosophy”

The Ceylon Journal was launched last August. Its first issue is already out of print. Only a handful of the second issue covering new perspectives of history, art, law, politics, folklore, and many other facets of Sri Lanka is available. To reserve your very own copy priced Rs. 2000 call on 0725830728.

Congratulations, Avishka [Senewiratne]. I am so proud of what you have done. Especially, Ladies and Gentlemen, to see and hear all of us stand up and actually sing the National Anthem was such a pleasure. Too often on occasions like this, the anthem is played, and no one sings. And we sang so beautifully this evening that it brought tears to my eyes. It is not often we get to think patriotic thoughts in Sri Lanka nowadays: this evening was a refreshing exception.

I’m never very sure what to say on an occasion like this, in which we celebrate history, especially given that I am a scientist and not a historian. It poses something of a challenge for me. Although we are often told that we must study history because it repeats itself, I don’t believe it ever does. But history certainly informs us: articles such as those in The Ceylon Journal, of which I read an advance copy, help us understand the context of our past and how it explains our present.

I want to take an example and explain what I am on about. I’m going to talk about rubber. Yes rubber, as in ‘eraser’, and how it crafted our national political identity, helping, even now seven decades later, to make ‘capitalism’ a pejorative.

As I think you know already, rubber came into general use in the middle of the 19^th century. Charles Macintosh invented the raincoat in 1824 by placing a thin sheet of rubber between two sheets of fabric and pressing them together. That invention transformed many things, not least warfare. Just think of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in the winter of 1812. His troops did that without any kind of waterproof clothing. Some 200,000 of them perished, not from bullets but from hypothermia. Waterproof raincoats could have saved thousands of lives. Not long after rubber came to be used for waterproofing, we saw the first undersea telegraph cable connecting Europe to North America being laid in the 1850s. When the American civil war broke out in 1860, demand for rubber increased yet further: the troops needed raincoats and other items made from this miracle material.

At that time rubber, used to be collected from the wild in the province of Pará in Northern Brazil, across which the Amazon drains into the Atlantic. In 1866, steamers began plying thousands of kilometres upriver, to return with cargoes of rubber harvested from the rainforest. Soon, the wild trees were being tapped to exhaustion and the sustainability of supply became doubtful.

Meanwhile, England was at the zenith of its colonial power, and colonial strategists thought rather like corporate strategists do today. The director of the Kew Gardens at the time, Joseph Hooker, felt there might be one day be a greater potential for rubber. He decided to look into the possibility of cultivating the rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis, in Britain’s Asian colonies. So, he dispatched a young man called Henry Wickham to the Amazon to try to secure some seeds. In 1876, Wickham returned to Kew with 70,000 rubber seeds. These were planted out in hothouses in Kew and by the end of that year, almost 2000 of them had germinated.

These were dispatched to Ceylon, only a few weeks’ voyage away now, thanks to steamships and the Suez Canal. The director of the Peradeniya Botanic Garden at the time was George Henry Kendrick Thwaites, a brilliant systematic botanist and horticulturalist. Thwaites received the seedlings and had to decide where to plant them. He read the available literature—remember, this was 1876: there was no internet—and managed to piece together a model of the climatic conditions in the region of the Amazonian rainforest to which rubber was native. He decided that the plants would need an elevation of less than 300 metres and a minimum annual rainfall of at least 2000mm. In other words, the most suitable region for rubber would be an arc about 30 kilometres wide, extending roughly from Ambalangoda to Matale. Despite his never having seen a rubber plant until then, astonishingly, he got it exactly right.

Thwaites settled on a site in the middle of the arc, at Henarathgoda near Gampaha. That became the world’s first rubber nursery: the first successful cultivation of this tree outside Brazil. The trees grew well and, eight years later, came into seed. Henry Trimen, Thwaites’ successor, used the seeds to establish an experimental plantation near Polgahawela and also shared seeds with the Singapore Botanic Garden. Those would later become the foundation of the great Malaysian rubber industry.

But up to that time, Sri Lanka’s rubber plantation remained a solution looking for a problem. Then, in 1888, the problem arrived, and from a completely unexpected quarter: John Dunlop invented the pneumatic tire. Soon, bicycles came to be fitted with air-filled tires, followed by motorcars. In 1900, the US produced just 5,000 motorcars; by 1915, production had risen to half a million. The great rubber boom had begun.

Meanwhile, the colonial administration in Ceylon had invited investors to buy land and start cultivating rubber to feed the growing international demand. But by the early 1890s, three unusual things had happened. First, with the collapse of the coffee industry in the mid-1870s, many British investors had been bankrupted. Those who survived had to divert all their available capital into transitioning their failing coffee plantations into tea. They were understandably averse to risk. As a result, the British showed little interest in this strange tree called rubber that had been bought from Brazil.

Second, a native Sri Lankan middle class had by then emerged. The Colebrooke-Cameron reforms had led to the establishment of the Royal academy, later Royal College, by 1835. Other great schools followed in quick succession. From the middle of the 19^th century, it was possible for Sri Lankans to get an education and get employment in government service, become professionals, doctors, lawyers, engineers, civil servants, clerks, and so on. And so, by the 1890s, a solid native middle class had emerged. The feature that defines a middle class, of course, is savings, and these savings now came to be translated into the capital that founded the rubber industry.

Third, the British had by then established a rail and road network and created the legal and commercial institutions for managing credit and doing business—institutions like banks, financial services, contract law and laws that regulated bankruptcy. They had made the rules, but by now, Sri Lankans had learned to play the game. And so, it came to be that Sri Lankans came to own a substantial part of the rubber-plantation industry very early in the game. By 1911, almost 200,000 acres of rubber had been planted and world demand was growing exponentially.

In just one generation, investors in rubber were reaping eye-watering returns that in today’s money would equate to Rs 3.6 million per acre per year. It was these people who, together with the coconut barons, came to own the grand mansions that adorn the poshest roads in Cinnamon Gardens: Ward Place, Rosmead Place, Barnes Place, Horton Place, and so on. There was an astonishingly rapid creation of indigenous wealth. By 1911, the tonnage at shipping calling in Sri Lankan ports—Colombo and Trincomalee—exceeded nine million tons, making them collectively the third busiest in the British Empire and the seventh busiest in the world. By comparison, the busiest port in Europe is now Rotterdam, which ranks tenth in the world.

We often blame politicians for things that go wrong in our country and God knows they are responsible for most of it. But unfortunately for us, the first six years of independence, from 1948 to 1954, were really unlucky years for Sri Lanka. As if successive failed monsoons and falling rice crops weren’t bad enough, along came the Korean war. In the meantime, the Sri Lankan people had got used to the idea of food rations during the war and they wanted rations to be continued as free handouts. Those demands climaxed in the ‘Hartal’ of 1953, a general strike demanding something for nothing. Politicians were being forced to keep the promises they had made when before independence, that they would deliver greater prosperity than under the British.

So, by 1949, D. S. Senanayake was forced to devalue the rupee, leading to rapid price inflation. Thankfully we didn’t have significant foreign debt then, or we might have had to declare insolvency much earlier than we finally did, in 2022. And then, because of failing paddy harvests, we were forced to buy rice

from China, which was in turn buying our rubber. But as luck would have it, China entered the Korean war, causing the UN, at the behest of the US, to embargo rubber exports to China.

This placed the D. S. Senanayake and John Kotelawala governments in an impossible predicament. There was a rice shortage; people were demanding free rice, and without rubber exports, there was no foreign exchange with which to buy rice. Kotelawala flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with President Eisenhower and plead for either an exemption from the embargo or else, for the US to buy our rubber. Despite Sri Lanka having provided rubber to the Allies at concessionary prices during the war and having supported the Allies, Eisenhower refused. British and American memories were short indeed. In India, Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress Party had chosen the moment, in August 1942 when Japan invaded Southeast Asia and were poised to invade Bengal, to demand that the British quit India, threatening in the alternative that they would throw their lot in with the Japanese. The Sri Lankan government, by contrast, had stood solidly by the Allies. But now, those same allies stabbed the fledgling nation in the chest. Gratitude, it seemed, was a concept alien to the West.

In these circumstances, Sri Lanka had no choice but to break the UN embargo and enter into a rice-for-rubber barter agreement with China. This resulted not only in the US suspending aid and the supply of agricultural chemicals to Sri Lanka, but also invoking the Battle Act and placing restrictions on US and UK ships calling at the island’s ports.

Understandably, by 1948, Sri Lankans entertained a strong disdain for colonialism. With the Cold War now under way, the USSR and China did all they could to split countries like Sri Lana away not just from their erstwhile colonial masters but also the capitalist system. If any doubt persisted in the minds of Sri Lankan politicians, Western sanctions put an end to that. The country fell into the warm embrace of the communist powers. China and the USSR were quick to fill the void left by the West, and especially in the 1950s, there was good reason to believe that the communist system was working. The Soviet economy was seeing unprecedented growth, and that decade saw them producing hydrogen bombs and putting the first satellite, dog and man in space.

As a consequence of the West’s perfidy in the early 1950s, ‘Capitalism’ continues to have pejorative connotations in Sri Lanka to this day. And it resulted in us becoming more insular, more inward looking, and anxious to assert our nationalism even when it cost us dearly.

Soon, we abolished the use of English, and we nationalized Western oil companies and the plantations. None of these things did us the slightest bit of good. We even changed the name of the country in English from Ceylon to Sri Lanka. Most countries in the world have an international name in addition to the name they call themselves. Sri Lanka had been ‘Lanka’ in Sinhala throughout the colonial period, even as its name had been Ceylon in English. The Japanese don’t call themselves Japan in their own language, neither do the Germans call themselves Germany. These are international names for Nihon and Deutschland, just like Baharat or Hindustan is what Indians call India. But we insisted that little Sri Lanka will assert itself and insist what the world would call us, the classic symptom of a massive inferiority complex. While countries like Singapore built on the brand value of their colonial names, we erased ours from the books. Now, no one knows where Ceylon tea or Ceylon cinnamon comes from.

Singapore is itself a British name: it should be Sinha Pura, the Lion City, a Sanskrit name. But Singapore values its bottom line more than its commitment to terminological exactitude. Even the name of its first British governor, Sir Stamford Raffles, has become a valued national brand. But here in Sri Lanka, rather than build on our colonial heritage, not the least liberal values the British engendered in us, together with democracy and a moderately regulated economy, we have chosen to deny it and seek to expunge it from our memory. We rejected the good values of the West along with the bad: like courtesy, queuing, and the idea that corruption is wrong.

We have stopped fighting for the dignity of our land, and I hope that as you read the articles in The Ceylon Journal that are published in the future, we will be reminded time and time again of the beautiful heritage of our country and how we can once again find it in ourselves to be proud of this wonderful land.