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In this book, John Tully narrates the history of rubber from the Spanish conquest of the Americas to the present. Although he does not refer to anthropologist Arjun Appadurai's concept of a 'social history of things', the book is clearly part of the recent genre of histories of global commodities.
After a brief chapter on Amerindians, Columbus, and early modern uses of rubber, Tully tells the familiar stories of Charles Goodyear's vulcanization of rubber, the role of Thomas Hancock, and the importance of the Crystal Palace Exhibition in the marketing of rubber products in the mid nineteenth century. He then focuses on the late nineteenth century, when the demand for rubber products - particularly bicycle and then automobile tyres - grew rapidly. Using the appropriate secondary sources, Tully recounts the exploitation of indigenous rubber gatherers in the Amazon, where Hevea trees - the most important global source for natural rubber - grow wild in the rainforest. As demand increased, the landophilia vines of the Congo also became a significant source of rubber, and the well-known abuses in King Leopold II's Congo Free State become the focus of the narrative.
Tully then narrates Henry Wickham's transportation of Hevea seeds from Brazil to the British Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. The resulting plants were taken to Southeast Asia and established on plantations. Here the result was widespread destruction of native flora, as well as the migration (usually in the form of restrictive labour contracts amounting to indentured servitude), of large numbers of Indian and Chinese labourers to Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Later, Michelin and others would...