S. B. D. de Silva and political economy of underdevelopment

By Uditha Devapriya

One of Sri Lanka’s most distinguished yet underrated economists, S. B. D. de Silva died five years ago, on June 15. His magnum opus, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment, remains as underrated and under-read – one could say unread – as he. First published by Routledge in 1982, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment followed a long line of scholarly treatises on underdevelopment in societies such as ours.

The issues it raises and recommendations it makes were as relevant to his time as they are to us, though we are a long way from the 1980s. Indeed, it could well have been written today: the problems that it underlies are very much present, and they continue to dog us.

As Dhanuka Bandara has noted in a recent review of postwar Sri Lankan English literature, the historical process is undergoing a paradigm shift. This year may have been the most eventful thus far in this century.

From the French President requesting an invitation to the BRICS Summit to Bill Gates meeting Xi Jinping, from Janet Yellen stating that decoupling from China would mean disaster for the US to Germany unveiling a national security strategy, from Egypt applying to join BRICS to an employee of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank resigning on the grounds that the Bank has been penetrated by the Communist Party of China, there is a seismic shift in world order. It compels us to revisit, question, even revise the political and economic paradigms in place right now.

It is in this light that we must revisit S. B. D. de Silva, his work, and his book. Perhaps not coincidentally, Asoka Bandarage launched her most recent study, Crisis in Sri Lanka and the World, on the day before his death anniversary. Professor Bandarage’s own magnum opus, Colonialism in Sri Lanka, was published just a year after de Silva’s.

Both works attempted to grapple, although from two somewhat different ideological positions, with Sri Lanka’s long, harrowing experience with economic underdevelopment. While Bandarage focuses entirely on the Kandyan highlands, however, de Silva’s scope is much wider. Indeed, it may be the last work of its kind authored by a Sri Lankan: jumping from one theme to another, it defies the sort of specialisation that characterises economics in Sri Lanka today.

What, then, are de Silva’s lessons, and how relevant are they to the Global South’s attempts at escaping the shackles of colonialism, attempts which long predate decolonisation, but have still not come to fruition despite the formal granting of independence?

S. B. D. de Silva’s book is divided into three parts: the first delving into investment patterns in colonial societies, the second into the link between the plantation system and problems of underdevelopment, and the third into a general theory of underdevelopment, for Sri Lanka and other “postcolonial” societies.

Central to de Silva’s argument is the distinction between what he calls “settler” colonies, or direct settlements, such as Australia and Rhodesia, and “non-settler” colonies, such as Kenya and Sri Lanka. The lesson in The Political Economy of Underdevelopment is that colonial policies strangulated development in the latter, in effect preventing them from accumulating capital to shift to industry.

Two themes dominate de Silva’s work, and they remain, for me, relevant. The first is that the supposedly “modern” plantation sector – broadly tea, rubber, and coconut, but also other primary commodities – is neither modern nor dynamic. That it is not so can be gleaned from two undeniable facts: the decline in the plantation sector’s contribution to value added as a proportion of the country’s GDP since the 1980s, and the decline in Sri Lanka’s share of the tea market.

The second theme is the shift in social science research from its commitment to questioning orthodox development paradigms to embracing them and operating within their framework. As de Silva himself puts it in his preface, social science has become big business, and this has stunted research. His book, in that sense, is not so much an economic treatise as a critique of orthodox theory, or the “conventional wisdom.”

De Silva does not spare anyone in his critique, not even himself. In his preface, he points out unequivocally that while the book grew out of his PhD thesis, the latter contained not a few assumptions and arguments he found to be wrong. Indeed, in his thesis he had contended that the estate sector he so forcefully critiques in his book was progressive and modern, and that the problem was that its growth impulses had not seeped into the rural sector.

Having gone back on his own hypothesis, he spends no fewer than 645 pages exploring one society after another, from the Maghreb to Rhodesia, from India to Singapore, asking why, and how, these countries grew or failed to grow, and what they must do to develop. The conclusion he reaches is somewhat unsettling, but nevertheless true.

“The specific elements which underlay the process of change in Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, and its historicity, render their experience non-transferable to the other units of the periphery. It is not conceivable that Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore could have carried out this process in a different period… There is now a revival of protectionism in the developed countries, a massive debt burden in underdeveloped countries, and the take-over by multinational corporations of their strategic raw materials, markets, manufacturing sites, and cheap labour resources.”

This, then, is de Silva’s great lesson, relevant as much for Sri Lanka as for the rest of the Global South: that solutions which worked for the more affluent half of the world will not work for the less affluent, and that development thrives on underdevelopment – in effect, that the affluence of the Global North has been subsidised by the impoverishment of the Global South.

The question as to what could be done can easily be answered: simply, a shift in the economic paradigms and theories in vogue in these parts. Yet that requires much more than will or initiative from the State: it also requires an intellectual climate conducive to such paradigm shifts, a climate that frankly does not exist now.

To be sure, we have come a long way from the 1980s, and more problematically, from S. B. D. de Silva’s generation. Only time can tell if we will consider his thesis, as pertinent to our time as to his – and as much to our society as to the Third World.

The writer is an international relations analyst, independent researcher, and freelance columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.