Paper short abstract:

This paper maps the history of rubber as a commodity, including its role in shaping state frontiers in the Amazon and Congo basins, its conversion into a plantation crop in Southeast Asia, the development of synthetic rubber, and the turn to sustainable wild rubber extraction in modern-day Brazil.

Paper long abstract:

This paper maps out the historical impacts of rubber as a commodity on Indigenous peoples, nation-state formation and tropical rainforests in South America, Central Africa and Southeast Asia. In the late nineteenth century, latex harvested from plants such as the Pará rubber tree in the Amazon rainforest, the Liana vine in the Congo rainforest and the Gutta-percha tree in the Malay Archipelago became a key component of industrial capitalist development.

While there have been many excellent regional studies of the rubber boom and associated genocides against Indigenous peoples in South America, this history has never been systematically and transnationally visualised. This study draws on material collected across regional archives in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Brazil to map out the expansion of rubber extraction and the consolidation of nation-state borders across the Amazon rainforest. Simultaneously, it catalogues the resistance techniques used by Indigenous groups in these regions, including evasion and direct conflict.

The paper will also analyse the parallel expansion of wild rubber extraction in the Congo basin; the subsequent eclipse of South American and African rubber production by the plantation system in Southeast Asia; and the development of synthetic rubber in the US and Germany during the Second World War. Plantation rubber production in Southeast Asia continues to be a leading driver of deforestation today, fuelling a new wave of capitalist expansion. In the Brazilian Amazon, contrastingly, traditional communities are now seeking to revive wild rubber extraction as a sustainable alternative to soy cultivation and cattle ranching, conserving the rainforest.