In 2022, Sri Lanka suffered that most abstract of catastrophes, an economic collapse, which brought people to the streets, expelled a president, and tanked, among other things, our currency. Our paradise has remained a permanent member of what was once the Third World and is now the Global South. All this, despite being blessed with fertile soil, bright people and a strategic location at the centre of the world map. Our underachieving economy no longer had a war to hold us back, and yet in 2022, Sri Lanka collapsed publicly and spectacularly.
Our economic apocalypse was nothing like Mad Max. For starters, there was no petrol, just endless queues coiling around the sheds. Then came the power cuts, and then the escalating prices. Then the people stormed the buildings and the leaders resigned. How did all this happen? A good question with plenty of answers depending on who you ask.
As a writer of fictions, economic systems and the vagaries of commerce have never interested me, until they suddenly became the main story. To understand Sri Lanka’s latest calamity, I read business sections and chatted to men and women who wore suits for a living. The more I understood about inflation, taxation, trade and finance, the more it appeared that the business world embraces storytelling as much as novelists do.
I learned about stock prices, bond indices, insurance policies and the basic notion of a company as a legal entity. All invented stories based on theory, maths, human behaviour and other intangibles. Stories that people made up, shared, quantified, accepted and now rarely questioned. The world of economics appeared as nebulous and as abstract as the fantasy worlds that writers dreamed up. By the time I got to the speculative fictions of derivatives, futures, credit swaps, foreign debts, hedge funds and offshore tax havens, my head began to throb. Each expert had a different narrative to explain the same catastrophe.
The invention of currency was one of our first fictions. Why did our collective imaginations gravitate towards shiny things, and designate gold and silver and gems as objects of value? And why have we now transferred this fiction to paper, plastic and encrypted numbers – objects conspicuously bereft of sheen? This gold Mohur coin is undoubtedly prettier than a ledger of crypto and was used to facilitate tax collection on behalf of an aggressive colonial power, a corporate raider armed with treaties signed at gunpoint. British Bengal of the 1770s was a place of wars and famines, where a multinational company, that other ingenious fiction, ruled Bengal through tax ledger and sword, through currency and conquest.
Many contemporary history podcasts wax indignant about the British and Dutch East India companies, their brazen plunder of half the world under the guise of commerce, and the parallels with today’s multinational corporate behemoths.
The multinational corporation is the original artificial intelligence, an entity which transcends the replaceable humans who create and helm it. It can command more wealth than a small nation, and cross continents nimbly through capital, credit and brand equity. It wasn’t the British who first colonised Bengal, but the East India Company, a few hundred clerks, who ran a continent from an office in London, who commanded armies of mercenaries, took over the world’s commercial centre and then sold it to their Queen.
Today’s corporations dwarf the wealth of most nations. The Apples, Microsofts, Amazons, ExxonMobils and Teslas have more influence over nations, peoples, economies and policies than governments do. Though, as this glittering coin and its story attest, this phenomenon is hardly a recent one.
Object No. 2010/1/235: the Monroe L160-X accounting machine does not glitter. Delightfully mechanical and adorned with circular buttons, wind-up cranks, triangular pegs and square holes, it looks like a typewriter that weaves its fiction through numbers and cogs. It is not my first encounter with this 1950 desktop calculator. Years ago, writing a coffee-table book for a bank, I saw one in the company archives, with its office nickname ‘Marilyn’ scrawled above its brand name, proving that Ceylon offices, even in the 1950s, had as high a joker-to-worker ratio as they do today.
