A World History of Rubber

Empire, Industry, and the Everyday

Stephen L. Harp

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118934258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A World History of Rubber helps readers understand and gain new insights into the social and cultural contexts of global production and consumption, from the nineteenth century to today, through the fascinating story of one commodity.

• Divides the coverage into themes of race, migration, and labor; gender on plantations and in factories; demand and everyday consumption; World Wars and nationalism; and resistance and independence
• Highlights the interrelatedness of our world long before the age of globalization and the global social inequalities that persist today
• Discusses key concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including imperialism, industrialization, racism, and inequality, through the lens of rubber
• Provides an engaging and accessible narrative for all levels that is filled with archival research, illustrations, and maps

1
Race, Migration, and Labor

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Suggested film clip: Goodyear’s “Island of Yesterday” (1920) https://archive.org/details/Islandof1920

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These people have lived as they live [now] through generations for thousands of years. While their ancestors were eating with chopsticks or with their fingers, the boiled rice and the curries which have been their diet for centuries, our ancestors were probably tearing apart with their hands and their teeth, raw meat; if they were not as some claim swinging from trees with the monkeys. These people are the product of a dead civilization, or rather an unchanging civilization. We, on the other hand, are advancing by leaps and bounds to the 100% efficiency point in thinking and living.¹

Thus did Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company introduce rubber plantations to employees in the United States in 1919. While it sounds ridiculous today, this short passage actually says much about North American and European assumptions regarding what was often called a mystical, unchanging, and timeless “East” or “Orient.” Although the comment on monkeys can be read as a bizarre swipe at Darwin’s theory of evolution, Goodyear’s broader point is fundamentally Social Darwinist and imperial. In the perceived competition among “races,” “these people” of the “East” had stagnated with a “civilization” either dead or static, while “we” (meaning “Westerners” or, to be more direct, “whites”) had moved forward and would continue to progress toward a perfect “efficiency.” Here Goodyear briefly laid out a key justification for empire. Europeans (and Americans of European descent investing and working in European colonies) could undertake what the French called the “civilizing mission [mission civilisatrice]” by making the colonized more efficient and thus more productive.

This chapter explores issues of race and imperialism in colonizers’ management of people and land from the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. For background, it begins with an account of the “wild” rubber “discovered” and exploited in the Amazon and the Congo, especially once nineteenth-century inventors fashioned various useful (and marketable) products out of rubber. Yet, for many Europeans the shocking abuses perpetuated by management on labor in those two mighty river basins did not necessarily point to the exploitative nature of imperialism itself. In their eyes imperialism was not to blame; bad imperialists were. The same line of thinking unfolds when we go on to consider the imposition of British, Dutch, and French rubber plantations in Southeast Asia, where Europeans firmly controlled the land as well as the laborers. Here “pioneering” Europeans were to put “unproductive jungle” to good use. (Today, Americans and European citizens decry comparable actions on the part of Indonesian planters and Brazilian ranchers as abusive labor practices and the wanton destruction of the rainforest.) Simultaneously, the European planters billed their efforts as benevolent, in that they were helping indigenous people by “civilizing” them, lest they continue in their present “lazy” state, with no sense of time or “efficiency” in their (as Goodyear put it) “thinking and living.” The chapter concludes with a look at the hierarchies of race on Southeast Asian plantations as well as in European and American factories.

“Wild Rubber” and Early Industry

No one ever used the term “Wild Rubber” until the development of rubber plantations at the end of the nineteenth century. Several trees and other plants that bore harvestable latex grew “in the wild,” long before they were cultivated on plantations. The resultant rubber varied widely in both quality and cost of production, depending on the source. Indigenous peoples in the Americas and Africa were well aware of the elastic quality of the “latex” that oozed out of certain plants for many years before the arrival of Europeans. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Columbus and other Europeans “discovered” rubber, much as they “discovered” so much of the flora of the Western Hemisphere and sub-Saharan Africa: indigenous people introduced it to them.

For centuries, Mesoamerican societies had harvested latex from what later became known as Castilla elastica, a tall tree found in what are today southern Mexico and Central America. Latex’s most important use, as described by the Spanish, was in fashioning balls for ritual games. Columbus himself saw what we would call a rubber ball, so unusual for a European at the time that there was no Latin or Spanish word to describe the substance of which the ball was made. At Moctezuma II’s court in Tenochtitlan (today’s Mexico City), Spanish conquistadors watched the complex game, especially marveling at the bouncing ball, so much so that they hauled both players and balls all the way back to Spain to serve as live exhibits for the Spanish court.

There does not appear to have been significant ongoing trade in latex or rubber objects between the Mexica and the Incas or other groups on the South American continent, so it is likely that the inhabitants of the Amazon river basin learned independently of Central American peoples how to tap what Europeans later dubbed rubber trees, including Hevea brasiliensis, or simply hevea. Tupi-speaking Indians in what is now Brazil called the tree cahuchu, literally “wood that weeps,” variants of which became the word for “rubber” in several European languages: caucho in Spanish, caoutchouc in French, and Kautschuk in German. Amazonians fashioned coagulated latex into a series of products, notably boots, which were obviously very useful in the tropical rainforest where the cahuchu tree thrived. Little by little, over the next two centuries Europeans on scientific expeditions learned more about the mysterious substance, seeing the actual latex-bearing trees, how they were tapped, and how Indians transformed the latex into objects. The Frenchman who first described a rubber tree, Charles Marie de la Condamine, had led an expedition to the equator in order to conduct measurements and verify the shape of the globe, gathering and describing specimens of plants and animals along the way. While in South America, he saw a rubber tree tapped and named the whitish sap-like substance “latex” (Latin for liquid or liqueur) and the smoke-cured result caoutchouc.

Although we generally associate the desire to find, name, and control global fauna and flora with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, it had a much longer history. As early as the fifteenth century, Europeans gathered objects, transported them back to Europe, and tried to figure out commercial uses. The “age of discovery” was fundamentally about profits. Initially, rubber seemed much less profitable than other “discoveries” such as cocoa, tobacco, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, or cinchona bark (from which the anti-malarial drug quinine could be produced, which in turn enabled yet more imperial expansion). However fascinating rubber might have been, well into the eighteenth century the substance was not an industrial commodity. At the end of the century the Montgolfier brothers in France used a sort of rubber sealant on their hot air balloons, and the British inventor Joseph Priestley used a nub of the substance to erase or “rub out” pencil marks, naming it “India Rubber,” a designation that eventually became simply “rubber.”

In the nineteenth century, rubber, a product of empire, became a product of industry. In the 1820s, the British chemist Charles Macintosh used coal tar naphtha to dissolve solid rubber (and then apply it to canvas to make effective raincoats, henceforth called “Macintoshes”). When combined with Briton Thomas Hancock’s patented “masticator,” which could chew up solid balls of cured rubber shipped from South America (later, plantations would produce crepe sheets), the manufacture of rubber products became possible outside rubber-growing regions. Up to this point, the latex had generally been smoke-cured into objects, such as boots or balls, on site in South America, then shipped to Europe or North America. Now, however, solid balls of smoked rubber could be broken down, easily dissolved, and made into objects in the Northern Hemisphere. Like cotton manufacture, which the British empire largely removed from India over time and installed in Britain, the base of rubber manufacture would similarly move from South America to Europe and the United States.

By the late 1830s, American inventor Charles Goodyear had found that the addition of sulfur to heated masticated rubber would keep the resultant rubber products from melting in the heat and cracking in the cold. In traditional histories of the Industrial Revolution, which inevitably focus on Britain, much space is devoted to explaining the strength of the British patent system. Yet, much like British free trade (which was not always free outside Europe, notably in nineteenth-century India and China), the British patent system worked well for British subjects and less well for others. Goodyear got a US patent for the process he had discovered, which he named vulcanization after the Roman god of fire. However, the British did not recognize US patents, and Hancock freely patented the same process in Britain before Goodyear did so. (As a result, Goodyear never made much money from his patent, even though many small nineteenth-century rubber companies paid homage by using Goodyear in their companies’ names; tellingly, the eventually huge and profitable American tire firm Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company did not belong to Charles Goodyear or his heirs.)

In 1851 in London, at the first world’s fair, the Crystal Palace Exhibition, rubber manufacturers exhibited a host of rubber goods in an effort to build a market. There Thomas Hancock and other British manufacturers showed toys, Macintosh cloaks, capes, pillows, cushions, life preservers, model pontoons, and assorted other rubber products. Charles Goodyear set up a large stand with myriad articles called “Goodyear’s Vulcanite Court.” He displayed walls, furniture, jewelry, household goods, and medical instruments of ebonite (hardened rubber later used for telephone casing and other products before the development of modern plastics). For a comparable rubber exhibit at the first international exposition in Paris in 1855, Goodyear received the cross of the Legion of Honor from French Emperor Napoleon III.

Less noticed at the time were the industrial—as opposed to what we today would call the consumer—uses of rubber. In the steam engines that powered the factories that built weapons, the steamships that carried European troops and indigenous laborers back and forth across empires, and the railway engines that moved men, women, and material in Europe and increasingly in European colonies, rubber was the raw material for a host of industrial parts. Washers, gaskets, buffer and bearing springs, rolling pistons, plug valves, hoses, belts, motor mounts, and other unseen rubber parts became key components of both advanced industry and the imperialism i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• Global Rubber and Tire Companies
• Introduction
• 1 Race, Migration, and Labor
• 2 Women and Gender on Plantations and in Factories
• 3 Demand and Everyday Consumption
• 4 World Wars, Nationalism, and Imperialism
• 5 Resistance and Independence
• Conclusion: Forgetting and Remembering Rubber
• Suggested Readingsxs
• Index
• End User License Agreement