Review

Reviewed Work(s): Burmese Entrepreneurship: Creative Response in the Colonial Economy

by Aung Tun Thet
Review by: Hugh Tinker
Source: The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, No. 1 (1990),
pp. 200-201
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25212621
Accessed: 31-03-2019 08:30 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland

This content downloaded from 161.200.188.246 on Sun, 31 Mar 2019 08:30:18 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 200 REVIEWS OF BOOKS

The commerce in rubber: the first 250 years. By Austin Coates. pp. xv, 380, 50 pi., 3 maps
(2 on endpapers). Singapore etc., Oxford University Press, 1987. (Commissioned by the
Singapore International Chamber of Commerce Rubber Association.) ?25.00.

It is hard to envisage any other scholar repeating the thorough research Mr Coates has applied
to his study. His sources are official and business archives in London and Singapore, old
periodicals, and interviews with individuals conversant with the subject - a few reaching back to
the First World War. A French reviewer might find it rather " anglo-saxon" in cast, but
conscientiousness exudes from every page like latex from the bark, while not a detail strikes one
as irrelevant.
But the book is truly a history of the commerce in rubber: the history of places is incidental
to the history of the trade, not the other way round. It starts with a lively account of the first
uses of latex by Indians noticed by Europeans visiting Peru and Brazil as far back as the 1600s,
the exploration of La Condamine, the interest of British merchants in Brazil in the commerce
in wild rubber, the romantic story of the switch to cultivated - contributed to significantly by the
experience of Mincing Lane, followed by Amsterdam, in marketing bulk commodities while still
on the high seas, the spiriting of seeds to Kew (Hancock and Markham) and distribution to
India and Southeast Asia (Ridley), the explosion of demand not only from the motor industry
(Goodyear, Michelin, Dunlop, Pirelli) but also from the electricity industry (Ferranti's lighting
up of Mayfair, then all London) - a fascinating tale most of us know but in outline. The middle
chapters deal with the rise of the Singapore market as production extended to more and more
of the Malay peninsula and islands, and the problems of finding labour; rubber shipments to the
USA played a large part in the development of trans-Pacific shipping in the First World War.
There follow the years of boom and slump - of dire effect on migrant labour - and the "political
rubber" of the 1920s, when Churchill promoted restriction of production in the teeth of the
Dutch and Baldwin put an end to it (without regard to market effects of his announcement), and
the devising of that sort of " ever-level granary", the American reserve stock, on the eve of Pearl
Harbour. Post-war technology, from synthetic to "crumb" rubber (a French invention) is
explained, and the effects on the market, culminating along with other causes in the emergence
of Singapore and the sponsors of Coates's researches as a, or the, major international market
of the world. The last words in the book are on rubber exports from Southeast Asia after
independence: although the industry in Ceylon seems to have gone to rack and ruin, rubber has
flourished in Burma while other production was dwindling to a trickle.

Dennis Duncanson

Burmese entrepreneurship : creative response in the colonial economy. By Aung Tun

Thet. (Beitrage zur Sudasienforschung, Sudasien-Institut, Universitat Heidelberg, Band 126.)
pp. xvi, 197. Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 1989. DM 36.

This analysis of arrested development in industry and commerce in twentieth-century colonial

Burma draws upon an impressive range of sources. The author's thesis is that British rule was
not just neutral or unsympathetic to the growth of indigenous enterprise but actively denied the
Burmese entrepreneur the opportunity to compete with the foreigner (British, Indian and
Chinese). He employs the term "decapitation" for British policy towards indigenous capitalism,
implying deliberate suppression of Burmese industrial initiative. In reality, the slow development
of Burmese industry was due much more to the strong position of the big British firms than to
government policy and in this situation "neutrality" arrested Burmese growth. Their main
ventures were in the opening of rice mills and sawmills. The number of small Burmese rice mills
grew from 27 in 1900 to 528 by 1930. The European mills numbered only 45, but each employed
a workforce many times that of their Burmese rivals. The four biggest firms operated a cartel,
the "Bullinger Pool" which to a large extent fixed the price of paddy and was much resented
by the Burmese public.

This content downloaded from 161.200.188.246 on Sun, 31 Mar 2019 08:30:18 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 201

All this said, the "decapitation" thesis still seems exaggerated. The author presents his
evidence selectively. One of his major case studies deals with the Burma Spinning and Weaving
Company. He alleges that "heavy financial burdens" were attached to a government loan to the
company and insists that further loans ought to have been granted. The reality seems to have
been rather different, according to the government report on the affair. The promoters of the
company set out to raise Rs 30 Lakhs (or ?225,000), but actually realised less than 11 Lakhs (not
15 Lakhs as stated, p. 73). They raised the remainder in loans on the open market "at exorbitant
rates of interest". A government loan at 6 per cent per annum was granted instead. The
Directors asked the government to take over their property: the object was to relieve the
Burmese Directors of their liability for the loan. The government left the decision to the elected
members of the legislature, who gave their approval. The transaction involved a public loss of
more than Rs 5 Lakhs (?38,000). A very different story to that related by Aung Tun Thet (see
Memorandum Submitted to the Statutory Commission, 1930, p. 132).
It is not, perhaps, surprising that a work composed by a Burmese in English and published
in Germany should contain textual errors. There are errors on virtually every page, such as citing
Gunnar Myrdal as "Mydral" throughout. A particularly confusing example occurs on p. 119
where "calorific" comes through as "colourafic". However, whatever its shortcomings this
study makes an interesting contribution to the literature of the economics of imperialism.

Hugh Tinker

A full hearing: orality and literacy in the Malay world. By Amin Sweeney, pp. ix, 338.
Berkeley etc., University of California Press, 1987. US $37.50.

The aim of this book (as stated in its introduction) is to study the relationships between the
oral and written traditions in Malay discourse. Neither has been independent of the other since
the advent of writing in the Malay world, for while writing has displaced much of oral tradition
and changed much of what has survived, oral characteristics persisted in written literature
during the period of manuscript culture, and even in the present age of print and mass literacy
many Malays still show a strong oral orientation. In this book Dr Sweeney expands some of the
discussion that appeared in his Authors and Audiences in Traditional Malay Literature (1980),
widening the scope to include Malay discourse as a whole.
Dr Sweeney begins by discussing the intellectual assumptions of the Winstedt generation of
Malaici, who employed a historical framework. In contrast, Dr Sweeney supports the view of
W. J. Ong, that this age of electronic communication provides an unprecedented opportunity to
understand the different stages of verbalisation (oral, chirographic, typographic and electronic),
and he calls for Malay literature to be studied, not historically, but in the context of systems of
storing, retrieving and communicating knowledge. Dr Sweeney then places the assumptions of
the Winstedt generation in sharper relief by examining the attitudes to Malay literature of the
eighteenth-century writers Valentijn and Werndly. Being themselves products of the old
rhetorical tradition, with its copious style and use of commonplaces, they differed from
nineteenth and twentieth-century Malaici in not finding Malay literature too repetitious and in
taking a generally favourable view of it.
There follows a review of the displacement of the oral tradition. From the early seventh
century, when (at latest) writing began to displace various orally performed functions, until the
nineteenth, Malay societies remained "radically oral manuscript cultures". By the nineteenth
century the oral specialist no longer transmitted genealogies, which were now in written form,
and other areas once dominated by the oral teller (religion and law) had not only been taken over
by writing but transformed. By the end of the nineteenth century, the oral specialist was not
much more important than he is today, except that his clientele was larger and included the royal
class. Today his role is vestigial and peripheral. Meanwhile the language of written Malay
literature developed into a distinct and fairly uniform idiom, but as it was based on the same
formulaic principles as oral composition it remained intelligible to illiterate audiences. Later,

This content downloaded from 161.200.188.246 on Sun, 31 Mar 2019 08:30:18 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms