John Sydenham Furnivall Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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British academic John Sydenham Furnivall (1878–1960) was born in Great Bentley, Essex, United Kingdom. He attended Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and received a second-class degree in 1899 in Natural Science Tripos. In 1901 he joined the India Civil Service, arrived in Bur ma (present-day Myanmar) in 1902, and received multiple promotions, culminating in his appointment in 1920 as commissioner of land settlements and records. His work in Bur ma led to a lifelong interest in its political, social, and economic evolution. In 1910 he cofounded the Burma Research Society, in 1924 he founded the Burma Book Club, and in 1928 he founded the Burma Education Extension Association. After retiring in 1925, Furnivall returned to the United Kingdom. From 1936 to 1941 he was a lecturer at Cambridge University in Burmese language, history and law.

Furnivall’s academic publications include Netherlands India (1939) and Colonial Policy and Practice (1948). In 1942 he wrote Memorandum on Reconstruction Problems in Burma for the soon to be independent government of Burma. During the succeeding two decades, he served as an advisor to the Burmese government, received awards from the Netherlands (the Order of the Orange-Nassau in 1948) and the Burmese government (Thado Thiri Thudhamma in 1949), and was awarded a doctorate by Rangoon University (in 1957).

Furnivall’s analysis focuses on defining and explaining the conditions under which colonial “topical” societies could achieve economic progress and welfare. European conquests produce plural societies, in which different cultural groups coexist in the same geographic region and are under the same formal authority but have different institutional rules and supporting moral imperatives. Within an individual’s own cultural group, he or she behaves by its rules. In other situations, in which interaction is with other groups according to market and contract rules, one’s own cultural constraints do not apply, and the other groups can be exploited. In this context, economic progress and welfare are difficult to achieve and uncertain. Economic progress is the expansion of production but is not the same as improving welfare. In Furnivall’s analysis in Colonial Policy and Practice (1948), welfare is the creation and expansion of the social environment that allows the individual “to obtain both what he knows he wants and what he wants without being aware of it.” Examples of these wants are safe food and water, fair commercial transactions, and honesty in legal presentations.

Furnivall believed welfare also included the enforcement of social obligations. In Colonial Policy and Practice he lists three principles of economic progress and welfare that summarize the contrast and potential conflict between the two. First, buyers “would pay twopence rather than threepence”; second, sellers want “threepence rather than twopence”; and finally, economic progress and welfare are conditional on the expression of a common social will—the acceptance by all members of society of a common set of political and social rules. For welfare to improve and progress to be made, the first and second principles must be limited by social will. The final requirement for the achievement of welfare is autonomy. Autonomy is the ability or political power of people in a society to develop their own criteria of welfare. Furnivall believed that while autonomy alone would not ensure the development of social will or economic progress, welfare could be achieved only when economic progress occurred with the development of social will and autonomy. His model presents progress as stemming not just from technologies or markets but, importantly, from the acceptance of the same concepts of welfare and norms of social interaction by all people within a nation. Rather than economic development’s resulting in welfare, autonomy and welfare were prerequisites to economic development.

Bibliography:

Furnivall, J. S. Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948. New York: New York University Press, 1948.
The Fashioning of Leviathan: The Beginnings of British Rule in Burma. Edited by Gehan Wijeyewardene. Canberra, Australia: Economic History of Southeast Asia Project, 1991.
Memorandum on Reconstruction Problems in Burma. New York: International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1944.
Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939.
Neale,Walter C., and William C. Schaniel. “John Sydenham Furnivall: An Unknown Institutionalist.” Journal of Economic Issues 36, no. 1 (March 2002): 201–207.
Taylor, R. H. “An Undeveloped State: The Study of Modern Burma’s Politics.” Working paper no. 28, Monash University’s Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Melbourne, Australia, 1983.
Viar, John. Economic Development in Plural Societies: The Institutional Economics of J. S. Furnivall. PhD diss., University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1993.