In the Realm of Rubber - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 216

ically with technical change, innovation, and the perfection of technologies. 59 Bicycles,
which numbered five million in Europe alone by 1900, were a critical element in mass
transportation as cities ballooned in size.
Atmid-nineteenthcentury,Amazonexportshadhoveredaround2,670metrictons;by
the early twentieth century, they averaged over 34,000 tons. Nonnative Amazon popula-
tions swelled from a low estimate of about 250,000 at the mid-1800s to well over a mil-
lion by the turn of the century—this in a period of relentless epidemics and murderous
labor regimes in which countless people died. The real population numbers were high-
er. 60
The Amazon rubber industry grew for more than a century, from about 1820 to 1920,
withaflurryofhighpricesandhighproductionattheturnofthecenturyuntilthe Hevea
rubber price collapse in 1912, when Asian products hit the market, although production
continued at high levels (but much lower prices) until the 1920s. 61 Technical innova-
tionsassociatedwiththeFirstWorldlatexeconomywereasvibrantasthoseofanyother
sector of the industrial revolution throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centur-
ies, and their impact was unbelievably profound. The Amazonian part of this equation,
however,wasbasedonthemostprimal, indeed prehistoric, elements ofhumanindustry:
a person, a knife, and smoky fire for curing the latex.
Whatseemsclearisthatlatextreesofmanykindswereintegratedintopre-Columbian
production and social systems in a variety of ways and for many uses, These systems
were dramatically (and often brutally) recast when the industrial innovations of the
Northern Hemisphere created an almost insatiable demand for this interesting resource.
This demand depended on technical changes in transport and many ways of deploying
labor that would create new social ecologies, sometimes building on old ways of mobil-
izing labor, sometimes inventing entirely new ones. Da Cunha, as well as other authors,
noted that the region was largely divided into two major production ecologies: those of
caucho and those of Hevea , and indeed he took this division as his central theme. It was
the vulnerability of trees to disease after they were cut for latex that, da Cunha argued,
determined the settlement pattern or lack of it during the height of the rubber boom.
Tapping Hevea s was more or less sustainable, depending on techniques, and required a
settled population of tappers, 62 but Amazonian caucho was a nomadic enterprise.
This framework of two economic trees ( Hevea and Castilla ), two latexes, two extrac-
tion techniques, and the labor regimes that were most associated with them became the
central axis in da Cunha's Amazon writing. It was a nicely designed experiment in his-
tory and civilization, since the environment was the same (and thus the tropes of vulgar
environmental determinism could be avoided), a mestizoized population was engaged
in the extraction in both cases, and both economies were engaged in a highly global-