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 establish plantations in French Indochina, while Firestone did the same in Liberia.
Tully subsequently turns his attention to Europe and the United States, paying particular attention to the development of Akron, Ohio. Here his interest focuses on working conditions, the labour movement, and the desperate efforts on the part of tyre company management to avoid unionization. Finally, Tully considers the critical role of rubber during the Second World War, artfully combining accounts of the development of synthetic rubber in Germany, of the slave labour used to build the (never finished) synthetic rubber works at Auschwitz-Monowitz (the setting for Primo Levi’s Survival at Auschwitz), and of the huge investment made by the American government in the production of synthetic rubber for the war effort. A short epilogue traces recent developments, making a parallel between Goodyear’s labour practices at the beginning of the twentieth century and the discriminatory treatment of ‘rubber worker’ Lilly Ledbetter, a supervisor, at the end.
The strength of this book is that it gathers a host of works on the history of rubber into one narrative. Tully has seen almost all of the relevant secondary sources, and he has also done supplemental work in American, Australian, Belgian, British, Cambodian, French, and German archives. In covering so much ground, he inevitably does not have much space for sustained analysis; the focus here is on telling a story. The thesis is that, while rubber became critical to modern industry (resulting in some ‘good’, but also in many oft-ignored ecological costs), it also led to horrible exploitation of rubber gatherers in the Amazon and the Congo, and of rubber workers in Akron and other centres of rubber production. That exploitation, Tully points out, occurred at the hands of many plantation owners and shareholders as well as King Leopold II, Harvey Firestone Sr, and Paul Litchfield, the long-time anti-union head of Goodyear. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the placement of the book with the Monthly Review Press, Tully does not hide behind a false objectivity, obscuring his views; this is explicitly and self-consciously a pro-labour account.
It may be for this reason that what is missing is an analysis of the consumption, on the part of millions of consumers (including many American workers), that also made such exploitation possible. While for the most part Tully implies or explicitly mentions the huge profits of rubber companies, he also correctly notes at a couple of points that, over time, profit margins for tyre companies were consistently slim. Why? Could it be that bargain-hunting consumers and automobile manufacturers relentlessly pushed down the profitability of tyres? What was the role of consumers? Were they simply duped by tyre-company advertising? In Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history (New York, 1985), the commodity history that set the stage for the recent onslaught, the anthropologist Sidney Mintz makes the link between the Caribbean production of sugar and the consumption of it by Europeans. In the case of rubber, such an exploration might reveal a historical pattern of a phenomenon probably now best associated with the American retailer Walmart: consumers who want the lowest possible prices are willing to ignore the exploitation of labour both globally and at home. Here it might have been useful for Tully to consult Richard Tucker’s Insatiable appetite: the United States and the economic degradation of the tropical world (Berkeley, CA, 2000), which has a fascinating chapter about rubber in which Tucker analyses the connection between the environmental exploitation of Southeast Asia and early twentieth-century American mass consumption.
Finally, while it is a fact that both tyre companies and rubber plantations, owned by industrialists and European and American shareholders, especially exploited people of colour and women, I would have liked to have seen its contours analysed as well as reported. Here Ann Stoler’s first book on the Sumatran rubber plantations and her more recent theoretical formulations of the interplay of race, class, and gender in colonial Southeast Asia are critical.Footnote 3
It seems clear from Tully’s narrative that professional historians and anthropologists in search of new insights are not his primary audience. Rather, the first-year student or educated general reader appears to be the target. This is a very accessible narrative that is well documented, a far cry from most popular histories. Much to Tully’s credit, it reads rather like Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s ghost (New York, 1999) and could be a good, globally oriented replacement for that work in the classroom.
