The Devil's Milk

A Social History of Rubber

John Tully

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781583672617
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Capital, as Marx once wrote, comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” He might well have been describing the long, grim history of rubber. From the early stages of primitive accumulation to the heights of the industrial revolution and beyond, rubber is one of a handful of commodities that has played a crucial role in shaping the modern world, and yet, as John Tully shows in this remarkable book, laboring people around the globe have every reason to regard it as “the devil's milk.” All the advancements made possible by rubber—industrial machinery, telegraph technology, medical equipment, countless consumer goods—have occurred against a backdrop of seemingly endless exploitation, conquest, slavery, and war. But Tully is quick to remind us that the vast terrain of rubber production has always been a site of struggle, and that the oppressed who toil closest to “the devil's milk” in all its forms have never accepted their immiseration without a fight.

This book, the product of exhaustive scholarship carried out in many countries and several continents, is destined to become a classic.Tully tells the story of humanity's long encounter with rubber in a kaleidoscopic narrative that regards little as outside its rangewithout losing sight of the commodity in question. With the skill of a master historian and the elegance of a novelist, he presents what amounts to a history of the modern world told through the multiple lives of rubber.

PART ONE

From the Sacred Essence of Life to the Muscles and Sinews of Industrial Society

CHAPTER ONE
Rubber in Mesoamerican Civilizations

The Balls made thereof tho’ hard and heavy to the Hand, did bound and fly as well as our Footballs, there being no need to blow them.

—ANTONIO DE HERRARA, 17th century Spanish traveler¹

Rubber was unknown to most of humanity until Post-Columbian times. Like tobacco, tomatoes, chili, maize, and potatoes, it was a New World product that gradually became available to the rest of the world following the Iberian conquest of the Americas. Before 1492, the peoples of Mexico and Central America had used rubber for recreational, religious, and utilitarian purposes for many centuries, but claims that it was used in Europe in ancient times are dubious. The assertion that King Croesus’s Lydian subjects in ancient Asia Minor played with rubber balls, for example, rests upon a faulty reading of Herodotus. The ancient historian does indeed mention that the Greeks inherited ball games from the Lydians² and there are extant bas-reliefs depicting such games,³ but there is no evidence to suggest that the balls were made of rubber. The claim that the Lydians were introduced to rubber balls by the Egyptians, who in turn were introduced to them by the Ethiopians, is embroidery on an already fanciful tale.⁴ The contention that a Cairo museum housed a 5,000-year-old Egyptian chariot whose wheels were fitted with rubber tires⁵ is also false, although the tale still reemerges from time to time in pulp fiction.

Rubber came into its own with the growth of modern industrial society, but it was important for industrial, religious, trading, medicinal, and recreational purposes in the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica.⁶ Rubber trees do not grow on the high plateaux of the Mexican interior⁷—and highlanders such as the Aztecs had to import rubber as trade, plunder or tribute from the Gulf coast where the Castilloa elastica tree grows wild.⁸ Often transported for thousands of miles, the rubber was exchanged for commodities such as jade. It had a variety of domestic applications: the Maya of Yucatan used it for hafting weapons; it was burnt as incense; and the Aztecs and Maya used it to waterproof clothing.⁹ While Aztec rubber raincoats shed water, they tended to melt in sunlight,¹⁰ a problem that was unsolved until the nineteenth century. Howard and Ralph Wolf, in their monumental 1936 study of rubber, claim that the Mexicans also used rubber to make shoes and breastplates, and to reinforce arrow quivers.

The earliest European accounts of rubber date from the period of the Spanish conquest, but some of what is reported as “fact” by modern writers using secondary sources is dubious and there are many conflicting claims. A number of writers assert that Christopher Columbus observed the Arawak people playing ball games on his second voyage to Hispaniola in 1493–94¹¹ and that his crewmate Michele de Cuneo noted latex-bearing trees on the island.¹² Whether this is true is difficult to say. According to T. R. Dawson, the first reference to rubber in print was made by the Spaniard P. M. d’Anghiera in 1530,¹³ but we know that Peter Martyr published an earlier account of rubber in 1511.¹⁴ A number of sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish missionaries observed its use by the Mexicans for medicinal purposes and in religious rites. F. J. de Torquemada, for example, refers to “oil extracted from ‘Ulli’ [i.e., latex] used to soothe colds in the chest,” adding that “it is [also] drunk mixed with cocoa” to ward off dysentery.¹⁵ A modern British writer claims that the Aztecs used rubber for syringes, “which had definite physiological applications.”¹⁶

The Ball Games

Antonio de Herrara y Tordesillas, writing nearly a century after Martyr,¹⁷ has left detailed descriptions of rubber’s use in the ball games of the Aztecs. The games have also been described in some detail by modern authors specializing in pre-Columbian history and the period of the Spanish conquest,¹⁸ and echoes of the game of batey survive among indigenous people in Mexico today.¹⁹ In an account published in 1915, the English writer Joseph Woodroffe claimed to have observed Indians on the remote Putumayo River of the upper Amazon basin playing a game with a rough rubber ball.²⁰ Variations on the ball game appear to have been played by Mesoamerican civilizations stretching from Yucatan to Arizona, the latter thousands of miles north of the rubber growing areas.²¹ The balls, Herrara wrote, were solid and “made of the Gum of a Tree that grows in hot Countries, which having Holes made in it distils great white Drops, that soon harden and being work’d and moulded together turn as black as pitch” and he marveled at their combination of weight, hardness, and bounce.²² Some of these ancient, pre-Columbian balls still exist: one dating from tenth-century Chichen Itza in Yucatan resides in the Peabody Museum at Harvard University,²³ and another can be seen in the Musée de Nîmes in France.²⁴

Herrara claims that Aztec emperor Montezuma introduced the Spaniards to the ball game, which was played in large stone “tennis courts.”²⁵ Contemporary observers agree that it was an astounding spectacle. The solid balls flew at tremendous speeds, and the players wore thick leather belts and pads to protect themselves from injury, much as the Indians of Sinaloa do today. Even so, writes the Australian Aztec specialist Inga Clendinnen, “the terrible impact of the hard-driven ball … was still sometimes sufficiently bruising to lead to internal bleeding and death.”²⁶ The players were celebrities in much the same way as today’s sports heroes, although the games they played were infinitely more dangerous than football. Another major difference is that the Mesoamerican games had great religious significance whereas our sporting arenas are populist and secular. “Every Tennis-court was like a Temple,” writes Herrara. Priests officiated over proceedings and each court contained two religious idols: one to the god of gaming and the other to the god of the game itself.²⁷

In 1552, another traveler, Francisco López de Gómara, published a detailed description of the games, noting that the winner who managed the difficult feat of hitting the heavy ball through a kind of “goal” placed side-on in the walls of the court was “obliged to sacrifice to the gods of the game and the stone.”²⁸ Herrara does not repeat this ambiguous claim, although he writes that “the spectators seeing the Ball so drove through the Hole, which they look’d upon as miraculous, tho’ it was only an accident, were wont to affirm, that the Man who did it was certainly a Thief, or an Adulterer, or would dye very soon, since he was so fortunate, and this Success was talk’d of for a long time, till the like hapning again it was forgot.”²⁹ Clendinnen, on the other hand, cites the friar Diego Durán to the effect that such a player “was honoured like a man who had vanquished many warriors in single combat.” Apart from such accidental goals, scoring was normally by the slower accumulation of points.³⁰ The original game appears to have been prohibited by the Spanish, “because of the Mischief that often hapned [sic] at it.”³¹ However, it is likely that the ban stemmed from the more general suppression of Indian culture and religion. Claims that the conquistador Hernán Cortés took balls and players to the Spanish court in 1528 cannot be verified³² and appear doubtful given that the Spanish banned the game. Gómara—who appears to be the putative source of the claims—only records that Cortés took back “eight tumblers, several very white Indian men and women, and dwarfs and monsters.”³³ Thereafter the game died out rapidly. Fifty years after the conquest and the arrival of Christianity, Durán had difficulty coaxing a group of Aztec elders into staging an unsatisfactory simulacrum of the game.³⁴

Blood, rubber, and metaphysics

In our contemporary world, rubber is primarily a utilitarian substance. Yet it also had important ritual/religious uses for the Mesoamerican peoples; unlike us “moderns” living in a globalized age, they seem to have regarded it with awe and veneration. As American academic Susan Toby Evans³⁵ has observed, rubber symbolized the “sacred essence” of life: the flow of latex from the rubber tree was associated with the flow of blood and “the rubber ball in motion expressed the vitality common to all things that move.” In common with many other preindustrial peoples, the Mesoamericans believed that they dwelt in a “living landscape” in which spiritual forces inhabited all things: trees, water, even rocks. In particular, “they revered things that showed signs of life—reflecting mirrors, feather-work, banners that ruffled in the breeze, shining metal that cast hints of brilliance.”³⁶ Rubber, with its unique physical properties, “represented a potent life force” and it was used liberally in the rituals of human sacrifice that cast so dark a pall over these people’s lives. The French historian Jean-Baptiste Serier notes that the victims of human sacrifice were painted with stripes of rubber prior to their dispatch at the hands of the priests: “Rubber, the blood of the tree, was the symbol and the substitute for human blood, the substance the most worthy of being offered in sacrifice to the gods.”³⁷ This is gloomy stuff indeed, but as we shall see in later chapters, the Europeans’ secular quest for rubber was to cast an even more somber shadow over the lives of the Amerindians and other indigenous peoples.

CHAPTER TWO
Rubber in the Industrial Revolution

Life should not be estimated exclusively by the standard of dollars and cents. I am not disposed to complain that I have planted and others have gathered the fruits. A man has cause for regrets only if he sows and no one reaps.

—CHARLES GOODYEAR, inventor of vulcanization¹

Europeans long regarded rubber as a curiosity. Rolls of caoutchouc and balls of rubber—known as “niggerheads” from their alleged resemblance to the skulls of black people—arrived in Europe aboard returning slave ships engaged in the Triangular Trade,² and were marveled at for their properties of stretch and bounce. There were some practical uses: the early Spanish troops in Mexico were said to have adopted the local custom of using latex to waterproof their clothing,³ but it was some time before rubber was considered suitable for such purposes in Europe itself. Consideration of the commercial and industrial possibilities of rubber date from the Enlightenment, and it was not until the nineteenth century’s Industrial Revolution that rubber’s potential began to be realized.

The Enlightenment

During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a number of scientific expeditions left Europe to study the geography and plants and animals of South America. The French savant Charles Marie de la Condamine, who sailed to Guayaquil on the west coast of South America in 1734, led one of the most important of these expeditions. In an epic journey, Condamine crossed the Andes and paddled by canoe down the Amazon River to the port of Pará (Belém). Two native Amazonian plants in particular caught his attention: the cinchona bush, from which quinine is derived, and the mighty tree he named the “heve,” which under the name of hevea (Hevea brasiliensis) was to become the world’s most prolific source of natural rubber.⁴ Quinine, it should be noted, was to prove essential to ward off malaria for rubber workers and planters when the hevea was later transplanted from Amazonia to Asia and Africa. Condamine took samples of hevea latex to Paris in 1736 and his writings caught the attention of the educated public. He had observed the Omagua people of the Solimões reaches of the Amazon using rubber to make bottles, shoes, hollow balls, and drinking syringes,⁵ and he experimented with his samples upon his return to Paris, using them to waterproof a coat and make a case for his quadrant.⁶

Condamine’s contemporary, the French military engineer François Fresneau, further stimulated public curiosity. Fresneau had spent fourteen years working on the fortifications at Cayenne and used his spare time to make a close study of the hevea tree, which grew wild in the nearby forests. He used the latex to make tarpaulins and airtight bags to preserve food, and in a paper written in 1747 he foresaw rubber’s use in an even wider variety of products, including “waterproof cloth, fire-fighting pumps, awnings, diving suits, pot handles, ammunition cases, boots and carriage harnesses.”⁷ Shortly afte...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface Why a Book on Rubber?
• Introduction The Muscles and Sinews of Industrial Society
• Part One From the sacred essence of life to the muscles and sinews of industrial society
• Part Two Wild rubber: a primitive “mode of extraction”
• Part Three Monopoly capitalism in Akron
• Part Four Plantation hevea: agribusiness and imperialism
• Part Five Synthetic rubber, war and autarky
• Epilogue Rubber in the Postwar World
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index