In view of its longevity and pan-Amazonian impact, the South American rubber industry of the nineteenth century has been the subject of surprisingly little research. While the two standard monographs in English, by Warren Dean and Barbara Weinstein, Roberto Santos' economic history volume, and Richard Collier's River that God Forgot have been rightly praised, all – as much as offering valuable insights – also indicate how much more there is to cover.

The Devil's Milk is not confined to the Amazonian rubber industry, and what it offers on that front is neither extensive nor original. Its brief is a global, social historical view of the rubber industry, more concerned with the satanic mills of Akron than the bucolic and bloody byways of Amazonia, the Congo and South-East Asia. The role of the Amazonian material is instructive, however, for its very brevity in the context of a global view indicates the degree to which, from a regionalist's point of view, accounts of the rubber industry are afflicted with a form of Amazonian exceptionalism, one just as characteristic in the twenty-first century as it was in the nineteenth. Such a view is based on the notion that Amazonia is fundamentally a rigid natural landscape which, however much it is periodically integrated or intertwined into a national or international panorama, still retains a kind of primordial reserve. In large part this is due to the fact that Amazonia has chiefly been exploited through extractive forms that provide little in the way of durable backward linkages/value-added production (rubber in the nineteenth century, cattle, timber, mining and fishing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries). Once an extractive chapter is finished, as happened with rubber in about 1915, the area undergoes an imaginative involution until its ‘vast resource potential’ is rediscovered.

The Devil's Milk's account of the Amazonian contribution to the global rubber industry focuses on the Putumayo material to represent essential features of the industry in a nutshell. It is the industrial setting served by Amazonian output, however, that both illustrates the unique contribution of the regional industry and demonstrates the vast interdependency of multiple manufacturing sectors and colonial and imperial politics, as well as esoteric byways of backroom invention and commercial ambition that linked remote and invisible tappers to the car showrooms of the United States and Europe.

Subtitled A Social History of Rubber, The Devil's Milk sketches a broad and ambitious picture of the industrial world preying for almost a century on an extractive forest product only to shift to South-East Asian factory-in-the-field production. It shows that Amazonia's close identification with rubber is rather more than a memory.