The Rubber Boom

“No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you’re still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.” — Steven Pinker

The Rubber Boom is an event that occurred in the Amazon Forest. It was brought about by the sudden increase in the demand for rubber for the manufacturing of various products. It made people rich, built economies that were struggling before into prosperity, and left many Amazonian indigenous tribes devastated.

Historical Background

The rubber boom began in the 1800s when inventions like the tire, which depended heavily on rubber, became essential in the manufacturing process of many products. These inventions significantly increased the demand for the rubber that is extracted from the rubber tree, which grows in the Amazon Forest.

This increase in demand encouraged many people to seek their fortune in the Amazon Forest. The problem with rubber trees, however, was that they grew far apart from each other. So, to reach a significant number of rubber trees, you had to control a vast area of land.

As a result, business owners brought their own private armies to claim those lands as their own and protect their newly claimed territories.

Labor was another problem these business owners, called Rubber Barons, faced. They didn’t have enough people to extract the rubber from the trees. So, they simply resorted to slavery. One rubber baron even enslaved 600 native women and started breeding them to produce more workers.

Putumayo

The most famous of the rubber barons was Julio César Arana. Arana was a Peruvian businessman and politician. He traveled to Britain to establish the Peruvian Amazon Company with the help of a few wealthy British investors.

The Peruvian Amazon Company started extracting rubber from a region in the Amazon between the Putumayo River and the Caquetá River. They hired a huge number of slave overseers from Barbados, who were working in the British sugar cane estates, to come to the Amazon and enslave the natives to extract the rubber for the company.

These over-seers committed unimaginable atrocities against the Amazonian indigenous people. They raped their women, killed their children, castrated their young men, and forced them all to work to the point of starvation and exhaustion.

These atrocities led to the death of 40,000 to 250,000 indigenous people from 1879 to 1912.

The Casement Report

In 1909, an American engineer called Walter Hardenberg wrote several articles about the atrocities he had witnessed a year before when he was traveling through the Amazon and was held prisoner by the Arana brothers. This led to an outcry in Britain, and the British parliament was forced to send a commission to Putumayo to investigate these allegations.

The British Consul in Rio de Rio de Janeiro, Roger Casement, was sent with the commission to determine the truthfulness of Hardenberg’s allegations. After seeing the atrocities being committed in the Amazon, Casement wrote the Casement Report, which confirmed what Hardenberg had written in his articles.

This investigation, however, didn’t affect the ongoing rubber extraction operations in the Amazon. What ended the Rubber Boom was a purely economic factor.

Decline

In 1876, Sir Henry Alexander Wickham organized an operation to smuggle 70,000 rubber tree seeds to Britain. The seeds were then planted in British colonies located in Southeast Asia and in tropical areas in Africa.

These new rubber plantations caused the cost of rubber extraction to drop significantly. Which led to the decline of the Amazonian rubber operations and ultimately led to the end of the Rubber Boom.

Implications

The story of the Rubber Boom doesn’t have a happy ending. Julio César Arana and all the rubber barons like him were never punished for their crimes. Many native Amazonian tribes were wiped out, and the tribes that survived were left in terrible conditions.

During the Rubber Boom, some native tribes fled deeper into the Amazon to escape the violence perpetrated by the rubber barons. They currently live alongside the uncontacted Amazonian tribes, who are generally aggressive when they encounter outsiders.

The pain the natives endured lingers still. Mythical tales like the tigre negro, a murderous black tiger that sucks the blood of his victims, and the pink dolphin, which turns into a white man and impregnates the native women, symbolize the atrocities that the natives faced. And these tales are still being told to their children to this day.

Alternatives

The atrocities committed in the Amazon during the Rubber Boom were totally avoidable. Committing these atrocities was a conscious decision borne of greed and looking only at financial gain.

The better alternatives to what happened in the Amazon forest would have cost the companies more. However, if you look at how much money the rubber barons made, it would seem that they would still make a significant profit, even with the alternative practices.

Fair Trade Practices

Instead of the forced labor that was implemented during the Rubber Boom, the rubber harvesting companies could have employed people from the indigenous tribes and paid them a fair wage for their services. They also could have implemented humane working conditions involving proper working hours and enough rest.

Implementing fair trade practices would have made the indigenous workers more motivated to work, and that would have led to more work being done by each worker, which would have led to the extraction of more rubber from the trees.

Engaging in fair trade practices would also have developed the indigenous communities that were involved in the rubber-extracting operations economically and socially. These indigenous communities would have started establishing small businesses and building schools. And eventually, they would have been integrated into the countries which controlled the areas they lived in.

Diversification of Rubber Sources

Instead of focusing on the rubber trees that were in the Amazon forest, the rubber barons could have tried to establish rubber plantations in different areas. Planting rubber trees elsewhere in the world would have worked because it was eventually implemented by Britain, and that led to the decline of the Amazonian rubber operations.

Had the rubber barons diversified their sources of rubber, then they would have been able to compete in the rubber market far longer than they actually did.

Thoughts

The events of the Rubber Boom are a classic example of the colonialist mentality. The greed, brutality, and disregard for people who were not perceived as “civilized” didn’t only happen during the Rubber Boom. It happened in the Middle East, India, Africa, and The Americas during the time of the first American colonies and every other place that the “civilized world” came in contact with.

People who lived in these places were seen as uncivilized and savage. Their lives didn’t matter as much as the lives of the “superior race” that took an interest in their lands. Their resistance to their colonizers was seen as an inconvenience that killing enough of them would solve.

Winston Churchill openly showed the world that he, too, shared this belief. When talking about the Palestinian Revolt in 1937, he said, “I do not admit that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right.

I will leave you with another “great” quote from Winston Churchill that is truly thought-provoking.

“I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”