The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Rubber Industry: An Historical Anthropology

This book offers a revisionist account of the Amazon rubber industry 1820-present. In analyzing the long-term, stable commodity chain linking remote forest tappers and key industrial processes in Europe and North America, it challenges widely held assumptions rubber production and rubber trade as well as the persistence of a hyper- naturalistic ‘lost world’ of the Amazon where ‘the challenge of the tropics’ is still to be faced and the ‘frontiers of development’ are still to be settled.