64
Incorporating Ceylon
larger eco-system in the organization of Lankan villages. For the British, land simply represented privately owned isolated lots (or estates) without any social, spatial, or ecological context. The villages, however, were largely self-sufficient entities comprised of homesteads, paddy fields, and communal land which provided common amenities such as firewood, pasture, and game. In many cases, forests in the vicinity of a village were used for héns (swidden agriculture), in which villagers grew “highland” or “dry land” crops, and which were also used as sources of water and for the paths of irrigation channels. These communal lands and forests were therefore collectively consumed by the villagers, and formed a necessary component of those settlements. Although a substantial contingent of the land sold by the state was forests not adjoining the villages, their clearance affected the supply of water (for both drinking and farming) and reduced the fertility of the soil. 9 “U ncultivated” and “unoccupied” lands were therefore British constructions, part of a strategy employed by the colonial state to abolish users’ rights to highlands, destabilize the “subsistence based” village organization, and commodify land for plantation purposes. According to Lankan customary law, however, the villagers had users’ rights to highlands surrounding their villages, regardless of the overlordship of the village--royal or aristocratic. Although some of the land categorized as “Crown Land” under the Ordinance was privately owned by Ceylonese, those who could not furnish proof of ownership, such as title deeds (sannas) and tax receipts, were evicted from the land they occupied, and the crops and buildings on them were confiscated. In this way, vast tracts of land were brought into the market and between 1833 and 1930 two and a half million acres of “Crown land” were sold to private individuals.10 Unlike the situation of cinnamon, with coffee, the colonial state had worked out a system that would both promote plantations and increase state revenues at the same time. Right at the outset, the pricing of land guaranteed a profit for the buyers. The land “giveaway” price was set by the state at 5s an acre, and the government officials re-sold it at an average of £2 an acre. Buyers included the Governor and many other high ranking colonial officials.11 In regard to capital for the enterprise, the Colebrooke-Cameron Commission recommended the dissociation of the state from direct involvement in the economy, simultaneously encouraging government officials to engage in commercial agriculture in their private capacity. A bank of deposit was established in 1832 to facilitate finance for economic development, and credit was easily obtained at 910% interest rate. As coffee production prospered, more British capital was invested in Ceylon from the late 1830s. For example, around 1844, the minimum cost of setting up a plantation was as high as about £3,000, but during the same year, nearly 130 coffee estates were opened up in the central province alone. 12 Nevertheless, capital was a serious problem, and more so for the Ceylonese. The greater part of the coffee plantations were owned not by companies, or big capitalists, but by small independent proprietors most of whom were short of capital. The Ceylonese who wished to join the plantations as capitalists were also short of capital, and their holdings were therefore small. Donald Snodgras has