The Devil's Milk: A Social History of Rubber

John Tully

3 ideas

1. Putumayo atrocities under Arana's rubber company

   In the Putumayo region on the Peru–Colombia frontier, Julio César Arana's Peruvian Amazon Company, registered in London with British shareholders and directors, forced Huitoto and other indigenous peoples to collect wild rubber under quota. Those who fell short were flogged, mutilated or killed, and tens of thousands died. Roger Casement's 1910–1912 investigation for the British government exposed the system, showing that respectable metropolitan capital was financing frontier terror at arm's length.

2. Follow the commodity back to hidden hands

   Trace a mundane manufactured object such as a tyre, a hose or a condom backward through its supply chain to the specific people who tapped, carried and processed it. This makes visible the forced labour, indenture and industrial speed-up embedded in goods consumed as neutral things. The consumer's comfort and the producer's suffering turn out to be parts of one connected system rather than separate worlds.

3. Plantations relocated exploitation rather than ending it

   After Henry Wickham carried Hevea seeds from Brazil to Kew in 1876, rubber was domesticated on Southeast Asian estates, especially in Malaya, and the wild-rubber terror economy collapsed. The plantation replaced it with regimented indentured labour, largely recruited from South India, marked by disease, high mortality and tight estate discipline. A technological and geographic shift in production changed the form of coercion but kept cheap, controlled labour at the base of the commodity.

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