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

Nugent, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1138894036 ISBN 13: 9781138894037

Publisher: Routledge, 2017

Synopsis

In this engaging book, Stephen Nugent offers an in-depth historical anthropology of a widely recognised feature of the Amazon region, examining the dramatic rise and fall of the rubber industry. He considers rubber in the Amazon from the perspective of a long-term extractive industry that linked remote forest tappers to technical innovations central to the industrial transformation of Europe and North America, emphasizing the links between the social landscape of Amazonia and the global economy. Through a critical examination focused on the rubber industry, Nugent addresses myths that continue to influence perceptions of Amazonia. The book challenges widely held assumptions about the hyper-naturalism of the ‘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. It is relevant for students and scholars of anthropology, Latin American studies, history, political ecology, geography and development studies.

About this title

About the Author:

Stephen L. Nugent is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.

Review:

“As Sidney Mintz does with sugar, Nugent does with rubber. This is the story of a product tapped by Amazonian labourers that led to industrial expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Illustrated with contemporary images, adverts and maps, the study is a treasure chest of a book. It reminds the reader of the value of an historical anthropology to examine the connections between workers, traders, capitalists, scientists and consumers in different corners of the globe. Yet this book is fundamentally about the Amazon, its people and their contribution to the modern world.”
Mark Harris, University of St Andrews, UK

“Meticulously researched and rigorously argued, this book rethinks the connections between extraction of natural rubber by peasant producers in Amazonia, international trading, and capitalist industry in London. Bringing local production relations into view underpins a powerful critique of rubber “boom and bust” thinking and continuing naturalization of Amazonian “development challenges.””
John Gledhill, The University of Manchester, UK

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1138894036
• ISBN 13: 9781138894037
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208