THE LEFT MOVEMENT IN SRI LANKA 5 in tea and rubber was replaced by company ownership. Imperialism as a system was typically only interested in extractive operations in respect of plantation produce, in accumulating the profits abroad and in reinvesting in the plantation sector. There was a rapid expansion of such investment. Tea acreage which amounted to 387,000 acres in 1899 increased by 70 per cent to 555,000 in 1934. Rubber plantations, which were first opened up in the early years of the twentieth century, accounted for 600,000 acres in 1934. The economy was thus a heavily lopsided one, dependent for nearly all export earnings on three crops. The corollary of the concentration of investment in the plantation sector was the neglect of the rest of the economy. Manufactured articles and consumer goods were imported, and the lack of any tariff restrictions benefited British industrial products and also thwarted the development of local enterprise. The only goods manufactured in Ceylon in the thirties, mostly by British-owned enterprises, conformed to the typical colonial pattern (tobacco, soap, candles, ice, soft drinks, etc.). Whatever other industrial development that occurred was directly geared to economic activity in the plantations. This was largely in the public sector and consisted of workshops in the railways and public works departments; in the privale sector there were engineering workshops which handled plantation machinery. An essential feature of this type of development was the virtual absence of a class of local industrialists and traders. The largest textile mill was owned by Indians. The only industries owned by Ceylonese in the thirties were matches, beedi, furniture, brushes and some minor industries associated with the processing of coconut products. The position was similar in the sphere of trade. The export-import trade was dominated by the British and the Indians, and even domestic trade was heavily foreign-owned. For example, in 1944, 90 percent of the wholesalers, 60 per cent of the medium dealers and 40 percent of the retailers were Indians. The economic basis of the Ceylonese bourgeoisie was plantation agriculture and mining (rubber, coconut, cinnamon, timber, graphite, and arrack renting) and income from small trade, rent, service contracts, employment in government service and the professions. The early beginnings of a nationalist movement arose when this bourgeoisie began to ask for concessions from the imperialists.z While a capitalist form of production was introduced into Ceylon through plantations in the 1820s, the plantation workers recruited from South India were kept in conditions not far removed from serfdom. Consequently, independent activity and organization among this group of semi-wage labour were retarded. However, the growth of transport and urban workshops ancillary to the plantation economy led to the emergence of a nucleus of urban skilled and unskilled wage labour. Urban wage labour, divorced from the traditional means of production in the village, found itself in a new form of employer-worker relationship in the towns. Being 'free9 agents, selling their labour on the market, a section of the