Description:
Examining rubber in the Amazon from the perspective of a long-term (one hundred years) extractive industry that linked remote forest tappers to technical innovations central to the industrial transformation of Europe and North America, the book emphasizes the links between the social landscape of Amazonia and the global economy. This book should be required reading for all those interested in the Amazon, and will be relevant to scholars of anthropology, political ecology, geography, history of Latin America, the industrial revolution, and development studies.
Review Quotes:
"As Sidney Mintz does with sugar, Nugent does with rubber. This is the story of a product tapped by Amazonian labourers that led to industrial expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Illustrated with contemporary images, adverts and maps, the study is a treasure chest of a book. It reminds the reader of the value of an historical anthropology to examine the connections between workers, traders, capitalists, scientists and consumers in different corners of the globe. Yet this book is fundamentally about the Amazon, its people and their contribution to the modern world."
Mark Harris, University of St Andrews, UK
"Meticulously researched and rigorously argued, this book rethinks the connections between extraction of natural rubber by peasant producers in Amazonia, international trading, and capitalist industry in London. Bringing local production relations into view underpins a powerful critique of rubber "boom and bust" thinking and continuing naturalization of Amazonian "development challenges.""
John Gledhill, The University of Manchester, UK