Stephen Nugent's account of the Amazon rubber boom is framed as an exercise in historical anthropology. Although Nugent deems his analysis ‘mildly revisionist’ (p. xi), he has many terminological, methodological and historiographical bones to pick. ‘Rubber’, a generic term for a variety of latex-bearing plants, fails to capture their varied physical characteristics, geographic distribution and methods of extraction. ‘Boom’ connotes a spectacular rise in output more fitting for Asia's overachieving rubber plantations than the humdrum consistency of Amazonian producers. ‘Bust’ conjures lives wrecked and societies pummelled, a post-mortem more appropriate for Manaus traders than rural dwellers reliant on mixed subsistence, buffered from economic shock. Besides, lowering the historical curtain on Amazonian rubber in the 1910s obscures its dominance among the region's exports, at levels equivalent to its turn-of-the-century performance, even in the doldrums of succeeding decades. ‘Extraction’, as a descriptor of ‘wild’ rubber production, masks the significant human intervention in the clearing of forest trails, processing of latex through smoking, and the varied ecological niches and resources accessed by tappers. ‘Amazon rubber trade’, indicting the peculiarities of exchange of a forest product for constraining regional economic development, delinks the commodity's history from the chain of a global industry.

For Nugent, however, it is the tendency of the rubber boom narrative to ‘mask complex, historical social landscapes in Amazonia past and present’ that is most vexing (p. 5). In obscuring or flattening the livelihoods of the peasant-extractivist communities that sustained and outlasted the ‘boom’, standard narratives project the image of a hyper-naturalised region: a land without people, a frontier awaiting conquest. Tales of elite decadence, sacrificing historical accuracy for cheap sensationalism, compound the impression of tropical dysfunction. As the Amazon's purportedly failed foray into modernity, the episode's narration only legitimises new-fangled economic development programmes. Indeed, Nugent argues, the very compartmentalisation of the rubber boom as a chapter of the Amazon's past distorts the fact that, a century later, the region's economy still pivots on the extraction of national resources, such as minerals and hydroelectric power. Now, however, the exploitation of ‘cheap nature’, in Nugent's deployment of Jason Moore's memorable term (‘The Rise of Cheap Nature’, in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, PM Press, 2016), is undertaken by state and (multi)national corporations in ways ecologically far more damaging than the latex trade. Over the course of an incisive but oftentimes meandering text, Nugent returns repeatedly to these points.

Although Nugent's presumed mission is to centre the tapper in Amazonian (rubber) history and to situate the trade in the global economy, most chapters do not assume the form of an historical ethnography or a fully executed commodity chain history. In part, the relative dearth of historical material and historiographic discussion that Nugent repeatedly bemoans frustrates the former prospect. And while Sidney Mintz's path-breaking work on sugar (Sweetness and Power, Vintage, 1985) openly informs the book in its methodological framework and comparative discussion, only the final chapter, focused on the industrial processing and manufacture of rubber in London, crosses the pond to illuminate the consumption side more comprehensively. In its stead, the reader is treated more to a critical literature review of scholarship on the Amazon that is interspersed throughout the text and that reflects Nugent's broad command of the field. Betty Meggers’ assessment of Amazonia as a ‘counterfeit paradise’ (Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise, Aldine, 1971), for example, is faulted for conjuring a Green Hell inimical to complex social organisation – a motif recycled in renderings of Amazonia's supposed devolution to a state of nature following the reputed collapse of the rubber economy. Robert Murphy's ethnography of the Mundurucu (Headhunter's Heritage, University of California Press, 1960) comes in for criticism for over-representing indigenous protagonists in the rubber trade (and distorting tapping's relative unimportance in the Amazon region by the 1950s), while Michael Taussig's exploration of the Putumayo atrocities (Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, University of Chicago Press, 1987) is flagged for the potential for ‘inferential generalization’ (p. 46) regarding the less traumatic lot of tappers in regions marked by different types of latex-bearing trees and labour regimens. Monographs by Barbara Weinstein (The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920, Stanford University Press, 1983) and Warren Dean (Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, Cambridge University Press, 1987) are diagnosed as indicative of the nature–culture divide that serves to frame much of the literature on the Amazon: the former veering towards a cultural explanation in emphasising unequal systems of exchange, the latter emphasising the physical constraints on the creation of rubber plantations in the Amazon. Bradford Barham and Oliver Coomes’ (Prosperity's Promise: The Amazon Rubber Boom and Distorted Economic Development, Westview Press, 1996) attribution of rubber's ill-fated potential for regional development to Dutch Disease is critiqued for its ‘economism and unguarded retrospection’ and its narrative of failure (p. 89). Charles Wagley's Amazon Town (Knopf, 1964) offers a dispiriting picture of post-rubber peasant society, Claude Lévi-Strauss’ depiction of tappers’ lives in Tristes Tropiques (Atheneum, 1967) oozes with melancholy, and Greg Grandin's rendition of Fordlândia (Metropolitan Books, 2009) represents another variation on the theme of man felled by nature. As Nugent reiterates, the notion of tropical defect serves to legitimate the contemporary assault on Amazonian ecosystems.

Nugent possesses vast knowledge of Amazonia and his text sparkles with a myriad of data, insights and comparisons. However, the free-wheeling, kaleidoscopic approach to rubber as plant, commodity, historical narrative and cultural trope tends to undermine the cohesiveness of his chapters. Redundancy in argumentation becomes taxing, while overblown prose and jargon detract from the book's readability. Although Nugent's interpretive quibbles with discrete scholars of Amazonia are clear-cut, the literature review relevant to rubber tapping and reconstituted peasantries also contains some regrettable omissions. Cristina Scheibe Wolff's Mulheres da floresta, uma história: Alto Juruá, Acre, 1890–1945 (Editora Hucitec, 1999), which examines the adaptations of peasant communities in the aftermath of the boom, is not included, nor is Mauro Almeida's enlightening Cambridge University dissertation (1993) studying more contemporary rubber tapper communities in the same region. Victor Leonardi's scholarship, which similarly exposes the myth of pristine nature and the erasure of human history in Amazonian narratives (Entre árvores e esquecimentos: História social nos sertões do Brasil, Editora Universidade de Brasília e Editora Paralelo 15, 1996), is overlooked. Tellingly, Nugent's repeated critique of the naturalisation of Amazonian history often assumes a passive voice, perhaps because scholars in the field would be unlikely to stake the claim. In this sense, the book lies betwixt and between: while undergraduate and graduate students might find its writing style and organisation trying, specialists might deem many of its contentions to be familiar. Nevertheless, Nugent's text skilfully synthesises much of the literature on Amazonian rubber, clarifying the historical record and subjecting existing works to important scrutiny. Nugent's passing represents a great loss for scholars of Amazonian history and society.