The Rise And Fall Of The Amazon Rubber Industry

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.

The first complete account of the rise and fall of the rubber economy in Brazil provides a dramatic example of one of the boom and bust cycles traditionally associated with Brazilian economic history. The Amazon rubber trade was one of the most important export booms in the history of Latin America, dominating the economic life of the Amazon for 70 years until the successful cultivation of rubber trees by the British in Southeast Asia. Yet this long period of vigorous economic activity left the basic structure of Amazonian society relatively unchanged. One of the author's main concerns is to explore why rubber exports did not generate substantial growth in either the industrial or the agricultural sector, and she finds the answers primarily in the relations of production and exchange that characterized the Amazon's extractive economy. The study also considers the impact of political decentralization and regionalism on the Amazonian economy, draws comparisons with the coffee boom in Sao Paulo that induced sustained industrial growth in that area, and traces the consequences of the rubber economy's collapse on the social, political, and economic life in the Amazon.

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.

Combining history with discussion of cinema, this book examines how film has portrayed five hundred years of Latin America history. An introduction on the visual presentation of the past sets the stage for essays that explore sixteen of the best feature films on Latin America from the perspective of historians.

In a world gripped by an ever-worsening ecological crisis there are present and increasing genocidal pressures on many culturally distinct social groups, such as indigenous peoples. This is where the genocide-ecocide nexus presents itself. The destruction of ecosystems, ecocide, can be a method of genocide if, for example, environmental destruction results in conditions of life that fundamentally threaten a social group's cultural and/or physical existence. Given the looming threat of runaway climate change, the attendant rapid extinction of species, destruction of habitats, ecological collapse and the self-evident dependency of the human race on our bio-sphere, ecocide (both "natural" and "manmade") will become a primary driver of genocide. Through nine chapters of cutting-edge research, this book examines specific case studies in geographical settings such as Iraq, Sudan, Nigeria and Brazil, to highlight and analyse the crucial connections and vectors of the genocide-ecocide nexus. This book will be of great value to scholars, students and researchers interested in the ecological crisis, Environmental Justice, the political economy of genocide and ecocide as well as environmental human rights. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Genocide Research.