The British Rubber Industry and the Empire

Rubber was the strategic raw material of the motor age. By 1910 British plantation companies in Malaya, Ceylon, and India supplied roughly 60 per cent of the world’s natural rubber. By the same year, British manufacturers in Birmingham, Manchester, and London were the principal consumers of the raw material: 90 per cent of the tyres fitted to British-built cars, and 80 per cent of the rubber used in British cable insulation, came from imperial plantations. William Gervase Clarence-Smith, in Rubber and the British Colonial Economy, 1885–1945 (1998), has calculated that rubber was the fourth most valuable commodity imported into Britain in 1910, after cotton, wool, and wheat.

The British rubber industry was a triangular economy: capital from London and Edinburgh, plantations in Malaya, and consumers in the imperial metropole and the United States. The 1876 expedition of Sir Henry Wickham — who smuggled 70,000 Hevea brasiliensis seeds from the Brazilian Amazon to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew — was the founding act. The seeds were germinated at Kew, the seedlings were shipped to the Calcutta Botanic Garden, and from there to Perak in Malaya, where the first commercial plantation was laid out in 1895. As John Tully has shown in The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber (2011), the technological transfer rested on a foundation of coerced labour that the official histories suppressed.

The Malayan Plantation System

The Malayan plantation system was built on land alienation from Malay and Indigenous peoples and on the labour of South Indian Tamils brought to Malaya under the kangani and maistry labour-recruitment systems. The Tamils were recruited in Madras Presidency, transported under contract, and worked under a debt-peonage regime that Tully and others have described as a system of unfree labour continuous with the indentured labour systems of the nineteenth-century plantation colonies. The mortality rates on the early Malayan estates, where malaria and dysentery were endemic, were comparable to those of the rubber boom towns of the Amazon.

The British plantation companies that owned the estates were among the largest single concentrations of capital in the British Empire. The Dunlop, Harrisons & Crosfield, and Sime Darby groups were vertically integrated from plantation to factory. The industry was also the most international of imperial commodity chains: rubber was re-exported to the United States (which took 70 per cent of British Malayan rubber in 1910), Germany, and France. As Sven Beckert has argued in Empire of Cotton (2014), the rubber plantation system shared with cotton the structural feature of imperial economic life — a peripheral zone of coerced production supplying a metropolitan core of industrial processing and finance.

The Stevenson Restriction Scheme, 1922–1928

The inter-war rubber market was the most volatile of the major tropical commodity markets. The post-1918 collapse in American automobile production produced a price slump that threatened the entire Malayan economy. In 1922, the British government, with the support of the Malayan plantation companies, negotiated the Stevenson Restriction Scheme with the Dutch East Indies and other producing territories. The scheme fixed export quotas for each producing country, restricted the planting of new trees, and stabilised the price.

The Stevenson scheme was a cartel. It worked for the producing companies and the colonial governments, but it failed the smallholder rubber producers — perhaps half of Malayan output by 1930 — who had to bear the cost of the restriction. It also provoked the American tyre manufacturers into developing synthetic rubber, an effort that would reach commercial scale only with the Second World War. The scheme was abandoned in 1928 under American pressure. As Clarence-Smith has shown, the episode was a textbook case of imperial preference in action: the British government had used imperial control of Malaya to enforce a price-fixing arrangement that benefited the metropolitan consumers and metropolitan capital, but at the expense of the colonial peasantry and the American consumer.

The Decolonisation of British Rubber

The 1957 independence of Malaya, the 1963 formation of Malaysia, and the 1965 expulsion of Singapore from the Federation were the political markers of decolonisation. The economic markers came later. The 1970s saw the rapid rise of synthetic rubber — developed during the Second World War, but reaching commercial scale only with the petrochemical boom of the postwar decades — and the relative decline of the Malaysian and Indonesian natural-rubber industries. By 1980, synthetic rubber accounted for more than 70 per cent of world consumption. The Malaysian and Indonesian governments responded by establishing the International Natural Rubber Organisation in 1980, and by attempting to negotiate a new international rubber agreement. Neither effort succeeded.

The British rubber industry, as a metropolitan phenomenon, had effectively disappeared by 1970. The Dunlop company was taken over by the British tyre manufacturer BTR in 1985, and the major Malayan plantation groups had long since been acquired by Malaysian, Singaporean, and (in the case of Harrisons & Crosfield) Malaysian government capital. The imperial triangle of London, Malaya, and the consumer was broken.

A Primary Source: Wickham at Manaus

Wickham’s own account of the 1876 expedition, in his On the Plantation, Cultivation, and Curing of Para Indian Rubber (1908), is characteristically understated: “The seventy thousand seeds I took from the Amazon in 1876 were not the seeds of an ordinary commercial speculation. They were the foundation of an industry which has, I trust, been of lasting benefit to mankind. The Government of India, in conjunction with the Colonial Office, undertook the experiment of cultivating the trees in the East, and the result has been the establishment of the great rubber industry of Malaya and Ceylon.” The phrase “lasting benefit to mankind” passed silently over the 100,000 or more Tamil labourers who would die on the Malayan estates before 1940.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the British rubber industry has been transformed since the 1970s. The older celebratory accounts — the histories of the plantation companies and the Stevenson scheme — have been displaced by the critical literature: Tully’s The Devil’s Milk (2011), Clarence-Smith’s Rubber and the British Colonial Economy (1998), and the essays in the Oxford History of the British Empire. The unresolved question is how to weigh the industry’s substantial contribution to imperial economic integration against the unfree labour regime on which it was built. Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014) has placed the rubber industry in the broader framework of “war capitalism” — a system of coerced production that, in Beckert’s argument, was the necessary foundation of the modern industrial economy.

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