Weight: 25% of your final grade Length: 1500 words Due: Upon completion of Unit 3 Instructions This is a comparative essay assignment that draws on the development of labour in the global rubber and c

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you should understand:

1. Why the cotton industry is a good “case” to weave together the development of different forms of labour with labour movements, and to understand them as part of global labour history.

2. That globalization is not a new phenomenon but went through different incarnations, each of which fractured global labour.

3. The transformations of interrelated divisions of labour that occurred in the cotton industry since the emergence of global capitalism.

4. The impact that labour movements had on the transformations of global capitalism.

Now, let us see how the “cotton case” helps us to understand global labour history. To this end, you will read Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism. As is suggested by the subtitle, Beckert uses the development of the cotton industry as a modern model to understand the history of global capitalism. What is new about the understanding of the history of capitalism does not need to concern us. Rather, to understand the history of global labour, we only need to consider the emergence and transformation of global capitalism as a frame to set the stage for various forms of labour and labour struggles. Though the book focuses much more on labour (i.e., people engaged in producing and processing cotton) than on labour struggles, you will see at various points that there is a two-way relationship between capitalism and labour. Capitalism absorbed some forms of pre-capitalist labour while it destroyed others. Yet, these transformations led to various forms of resistance, either against the subordination to capitalist rule or the conditions by which labour is supposed to be performed under that rule. Not all forms of resistance left their mark on capitalism, but many did. In other words, capitalism sets the conditions under which labour is performed, and labour struggles lead to transformations of capitalism.

After providing a short history of cotton production and usage before capitalism, Beckert shows how capitalism developed, how it created diverse forms of labour, and how these forms were connected through markets and global supply-chains long before they became pervasive in the late 20th century. Beckert also shows that global capitalism developed in highly uneven ways, actually dividing the world either into centres of industrial capitalism or peripheries of powerlessness and exploitation. For example, the rise of industrial capitalism led to a move of cotton processing from the countries where it was already cultivated in pre-capitalist times to industrial centres in Northwestern Europe and, sometime later, the US. Some of the cotton textiles produced by capitalist industries replaced small-scale and subsistence production in those countries, but a lot of them were also exported to the peripheries where cotton was grown.

Only in recent decades, not the least in response to textile workers in the industrial centres demanding better pay and working conditions, did capitalists move cotton processing back to the countries where cotton was first sourced. Along the way, cotton production was also moved to many places where it did not naturally grow and, as a complement to changing divisions of labour, the technologies used in producing and processing cotton changed beyond recognition. Once the key resource in steam-powered textile mills, cotton has become a commodity whose production applies the latest in biochemical engineering and whose transportation relies on computer-aided logistics systems. However, the turning of fabrics into textiles has not changed much since the invention of the sewing machine. Textile-bots exist, but it is still unclear whether they can compete with the precision of human hands operating sewing machines without pricing themselves out of the market.

Before we get lost in speculations about the future, let us pick up the book and read. You will find out quickly that Beckert covers a lot of ground. Though he lays out his main arguments quite clearly and recurrently picks them up throughout the book, there is a real danger of not seeing the forest for the trees. Making sense of history requires theoretical guidance through a wide range of empirical facts. At the same time, arguments developed theoretically need to stand the test of fact-checking. If arguments do not make sense, they need to be refined. The authors of scholarly texts are often engaged in an ongoing exchange between facts and theory. And so should readers. One way to do this is by charting labour across time and space. Below you find a table titled “Charting Labour Across Time and Space” using the theoretical concepts introduced in Unit 1 to organize facts about cotton labour across regions and periods of time. Defining periods of time that demarcate one set of circumstances against another is one of the key tools that historians implement in making sense of history.

Beckert offers a periodization that you can use for your charting exercise. If you have other ideas with how the table is set up, alter it as you see fit. And use as many rows as you need. You could also think about marking all places that appear in the book on a world map, possibly adding dates and one or two key words.

The main point is that you collect details from the book in an ordered way. Without doing so, you either lose sight of the main storyline behind all the detail, or you end up with a storyline that you cannot substantiate for lack of detail. In Unit 3, you will complement this table with another, titled “Charting Labour Across Time and Space – Rubber.” Both tables, along with the commentary from Unit 1, will help you to construct arguments in Unit 4 when we shift our attention from labour to labour movements.

War Capitalism and a Global Commodity

In the introduction to Empire of Cotton, Beckert lays out his main arguments for the rest of book; read this chapter carefully and write them down. If you ever feel lost in details in later chapters, you can review these arguments to determine which specific points made in other parts of the book contribute to them, or if at all.

Chapter 1 begins with the pre-capitalist history of cotton. It shows the different places in which it was grown before global capitalism emerged, a majority of which were local communities where cotton was the only crop cultivated. It also portrays then existing gender divisions of labour with men tilling the soil, women spinning, and weaving done by both men and women. Most cotton production and processing was part of subsistence farming, but parts of it were also integrated with long-distance trade in which merchants using the “putting-out system” would contract production to local weavers.

The first cotton industries in Europe relied on raw cotton imports from the Ottoman Empire and were centred in Genoa and Venice, which were also hubs for long-distance trade and mercantile capitalism. However, Genoan and Venetian merchants had no control over the amount of cotton that was available on the market. Their supplies were severely curtailed when Ottoman rulers limited exports to build a cotton industry within their own empire. Hence, the chapter spans the development from pre-capitalist cotton production to cotton becoming a global commodity.

Chapter 2 shows how European capital gained control over cotton supplies, mostly from Arab and Indian traders. Beckert uses the term “war capitalism” to describe this process in which military force played a key role in gaining market control. The establishment of trading corporations such as the British and Dutch East India Companies were part of this process. Sales of cotton processes in Europe would partially be used to buy slaves in Africa who were carried of to the Americas where they worked in the emerging plantation economy. Two things are crucial here: First is the parallel use of military force and market exchange to establish and control a Europe-centred cotton empire; second is the expansion of capitalist rule in every part of the world, which led to a division between imperial centres and colonial peripheries. This expansion involved displacements and forced migrations in many places. These included the aforementioned slaves shipped to the Americas, indigenous people who were pushed off their lands in the colonial world, and peasants who were also forced off their land in Europe to look for jobs in the emerging cotton industry. Cotton plantations were established to secure a steady flow of raw cotton without which these industries could not operate profitably. While trading companies controlled the trade with cotton produced in Asia, they did not control its production. Therefore, they could not guarantee the steady flow that the cotton industry needed.

Chapter 3 explains the emergence of industrial capitalism that superseded the period of war capitalism. During that period, English cotton traders imported knowhow from India and China. In technological terms, England, like the rest of Europe, was a laggard, not a pioneer. It was market control that gave English traders a competitive edge over their counterparts in Asia. This control allowed them to operate on a much larger scale, which made the use of machines profitable and in turn revolutionized production. To fuel this production, small producers traditionally tied to merchants through the putting-out system were increasingly replaced with factories in which an industrial proletariat would work under direct management control. Correspondingly, factory-processed cotton was so much cheaper that it could outcompete producers in Asia even though the latter did not have to transport raw cotton and fabrics over long distances. The transformation of war capitalism into industrial capitalism was supported by massive state intervention, which included the maintenance of colonies that delivered cheap raw materials and the suppression of early forms of workers organizing against the new ruling class of industrial capitalists.

Chapter 4 details the global effects of the cotton boom in England, which brought about an increase in prices that made the production of raw cotton more profitable. Cotton traders in various parts of the world sought to expand production. To do so, they conquered new lands, which included the displacement and murder of indigenous people and the capture of more slaves as the plantation economy in the Americas grew, despite massive opposition. Santa Domingue was a hub for cotton production before the Haitian Revolution; after the revolution, it lost that role and the US South became the global hub of cotton production.

Chapter 5 analyzes the westward colonization of North America and the growth of the plantation economy that came with it. It shows that the forms of control over labour developed on slave plantations were later employed in English textile mills. The chapter further highlights the conflicts between the abolitionist movement and English industrialists who feared that the end of slavery would spell the end of raw cotton. Somewhat paradoxically, US independence guaranteed the continuation of slave plantations and lifted restrictions on the dispossession of indigenous people, creating a boon to the transatlantic cotton economy. These slave plantations operated in concert with textile mills in England and, increasingly, Western Europe—where workers were sometimes labelled “wage slaves.” Fear of slave rebellions like the one that had brought independence to Haiti led cotton industrialists on the search for supplies elsewhere. Peasants in India succeeded in defending subsistence production against attempts to produce cotton by force. In Egypt, on the other hand, the state was strong enough to overcome peasant resistance.

Study Questions

As you work through the required readings in this section, think about the following study questions:

1. In which parts of the world, and how, was cotton produced and processed in pre-capitalist times?

1. What made cotton a global commodity? What were the relations between the production, processing, and trade of cotton?

2. What does Beckert mean by “war capitalism”? Do you find the term useful? If so, why? If not, can you think of a better term to describe the time period Beckert labels war capitalism?

3. Can you describe the global network of cotton production and processing during the times of war capitalism? Which kinds of resistance did labourers engage in during that time?

4. What caused the transformation of war capitalism into industrial capitalism? How did divisions of labour change during that time? Which kinds of resistance did labourers engage in?

5. Which effects did the abolitionist movement have on the cotton empire? Why were English industrialists opposed to the abandonment of slavery? Why did US independence allow the continuation of slavery?

Industrial Capitalism and Imperialism

The previous section of this unit followed the cotton story from its pre-capitalist origins to cotton becoming a global commodity during the age of war capitalism, and ended with the emergence of industrial capitalism in England and the effects of the cotton boom triggered by this new form of capitalism in other parts of the world. This section starts with a look at the spread of industrial capitalism beyond England and ends with the imperialist rivalries that culminated in the First World War, which was followed by the industrialization of the European colonial powers.

Chapter 6 of Empire of Cotton highlights commonalities between countries in which cotton industries, following the English lead and importing new technologies from England, developed. All of these countries had a long tradition of spinning and weaving. Traditional knowledge that had been used in textile production, not necessarily cotton, was usually blended with imported new technologies by the emergent textile capitalists in various countries. A second commonality was access to capital to finance investments in textile mills, which often came from merchant capitalists who made their fortunes in the earlier age of war capitalism. The third commonality was state support for the then new industries. This could include credit provided by the state but most importantly tariff protection. No state that did not have the power to impose tariffs to keep established competitors out saw the emergence of industrial capitalism on its territory. This is one of the key reasons none of the colonies industrialized.

Chapter 7 looks at the recruitment of workers in textile industries and compares different forms of control. While the use of slave labour required many (and costly) overlookers, factory work was increasingly machine-paced, which helped industrial capitalists keep costs for supervisors low. However, even small numbers of supervisors coerced workers, often violently, into complying with the factory regime. In these efforts, they were usually backed by the state that suppressed many, or all, forms of worker organization. Many factory workers were former peasants who had been pushed off of their lands and had no other means to sustain themselves other than to look for work in burgeoning industrial districts. Due to higher productivity, factory-made textiles outcompeted small-scale production. Many families who were engaged in this kind of production saw their livelihoods destroyed and joined the ranks of the growing industrial proletariat. Contrary to common images of factory work as being men’s work, it should be remembered that, at certain points, up to 70% of factory workers were women, up to 30% children.

Chapter 8 shows how the spread of industrial capitalism across countries led to the formation of a transnational capitalist class that shared economic interests and maximized profits on their investments, but did not always pursue the same politics. Generally preferring free trade that facilitated the flow of raw cotton from slave plantations to textile mills and eventually to consumer markets, capitalists in some countries would also seek tariff protections to support the build-up of new industries in some places.

Chapter 9 demonstrates how conflict between free trade and protectionism could escalate in the US, where plantation owners were eager to sustain unhindered exports of raw cotton to European textile mills, while investors in the North sought tariff protection to establish their own brand of industrial capitalism and divert Southern raw cotton supplies towards their own factories. This conflict led to the American Civil War, which disrupted the hitherto existing cotton supply chain and led to mass unemployment in English factories and a boom in cotton production in India, Egypt, and Brazil. In the US, the Civil War turned into a war to end slavery in the southern states, which caused many textile capitalists in the northern states to fear that liberated slaves might turn to subsistence farming and dry out cotton supplies. Such fears spurred efforts to expand the cultivation of cotton in other parts of the world.

Chapter 10 examines US cotton planters’ efforts to continue the coercive system of the control of labour that they had established under the reign of slavery after slavery had ended. It also shows that the 1873 economic crisis helped the planters greatly in regaining control over former slaves who did not have other means of sustenance other than working on the plantations. At the same time, the cotton glut that was caused by the crisis led to a shift of power from planters to textile industrialists in the US—which increasingly became the centre of global textile production.

Chapter 11 looks at the further destruction of cotton industries in the colonial world as the US became the main centre of global textile production. Though spinning and weaving were just one the activities subsistence farmers were engaged in, the destruction of these activities under competitive pressure from imported yarns and fabrics was enough to force many of them into cash-crop production that would offer cheap raw cotton to textile mills in industrial and imperial centres. Specialization on cash-crop production led to a decline in food production, which, in turn, caused food shortages, rising prices in local markets, and rebellions in many countries across the colonial world. In some cases, local governments sought to prevent or contain such rebellions by establishing cooperatives and providing cheap credit to sharecroppers.

Chapter 12 explains the emergence of imperialist rivalries between the industrial centres, and shows the efforts made by the ruling elites in those centres to gain full control over cotton supplies from regions they considered within their peripheries: European power in Africa, Japan in Korea, Russia through eastward expansion into Central Asia, and in the US from New England down through the Carolinas and westward across the southern states. The chapter also demonstrates that these imperialist efforts were often supported by the labour movements that had developed over the course of industrialization in those centres.

Study Questions

As you work through the required readings in his section, think about the following study questions:

1. To which countries did the Industrial Revolution spread? What did they have in common? What distinguished them from other countries?

1. How were factory workers recruited? How was their work different from the work on cotton plantations?

2. What were the economic interests of industrial capitalists? What were their politics?

3. What were the causes of the American Civil War? Which effects did it have on the cotton industry in the US, and how did it effect the global empire of cotton?

4. What were the causes of popular rebellions in many parts of the colonial world in the late 19th century?

5. What were the causes of increasing imperialist rivalries from the late 19th century to the beginning of World War One? Which role did labour movements play in these rivalries?

The Return of the Global South

The final two chapters of Empire of Cotton tell the story of how, ever since cotton became a global commodity in the 17th century, the Global South was largely reduced to the status of supplier of cheap raw cotton and once again became a site of cotton processing. Beckert traces this return back to the 1860s, broadly speaking of the American Civil War era, which we covered in Unit 2. But in chapters 13 and 14 he tells a different story. In earlier chapters, he presents the Civil War as a watershed moment that led to the rise of the US as the centre of industrial capitalism and imperialist rivalries between all centres; whereas by the end of the book, he circles back and explains that these transformations eventually led to a tighter grip on peripheries throughout the rest of the colonial world, where the seeds of a counter-movement were sown and led to the resurgence of the Global South.

Against the backdrop of neoliberal globalization—often presented as an entirely new phenomenon starting in the 1980s with the turn from national economic development to free trade—Beckert recovers the pre-history of neoliberal globalization. War capitalism and industrial capitalism, whose respective developments he explains in presenting the cotton case, were part of earlier forms of globalization. Foregrounding these earlier globalizations could then be understood as a rebalancing act, despite the attention that scholarly work and the media devote to neoliberal globalization while neglecting earlier globalizations.

Beckert shows that rising labour costs were actually already a concern of industrial capitalists in the industrial centres of the Global North by the late 19th century, which eventually resulted neoliberal globalization—the chief factor leading to the relocation of textile production from the North to South from the 1970s and 1980s onwards. The 19th century was not just an era of imperialist rivalries, but also an era of the emergence of organized labour movements. Despite fierce, if not violent, opposition from employers, these movements did achieve some improvements in terms of wages and working conditions, though unevenly spread across regions and different types of workers. To employers, these improvements contributed to the dangers of squeezed profits, if not a complete takeover of their businesses by socialist worker movements. Luring the more moderate factions of those movements into imperialist efforts was one response to those fears. Putting capital in other industries, and thereby leaving market share to aspiring capitalists in the South, was another.

While capitalists in the North during the late 19th century sought to integrate parts of the labour movement into imperialist projects, capitalists in the South also sought some kind of collaboration with emerging working classes. To be sure, relations between capital and labour were fraught with conflict. Though continuing to be technologically lagging behind the centres in the North, Southern capitalists sought competitive advantage through pressure on wages. However, they also came to understand that alliances with workers might open a way to decolonization that would allow, following the example of industrial centres in the North, industries to develop behind protective tariff walls. This combination of decolonization and industrialization also aimed at economic independence from the imperialist centres in the North. Neoliberal globalization, then, was a project to roll back such prospects by integrating post-colonial regimes in a global capitalism still very much controlled by Northern centres, chiefly the US. This integration left much of global textile production to the South during a time when the textile industry lost the dominant position that it occupied during the times of war capitalism and the first—indeed, textile based—incarnation of industrial capitalism. Its next incarnation, with the auto industry as the lead industry, is where we turn our sights in further understanding global labour history: the “rubber case,” which we will examine in Unit 3.

Study Questions

As you work through the required readings in this section, think about the following study questions:

1. What did labour movements in the industrial centres accomplish in the late 19th century? What were their relations with employers?

1. What were the relations between capitalists and workers from the late 19th century onwards?

2. Did relations between capitalists and workers in the Global North and/or Global South, affect imperialist rivalries?

3. What does Beckert mean by resurgence of the Global South? What were the reasons for this resurgence? What does it imply for the prospect of labour movements in both regions?

Unit 3:

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you should understand:

1. Why the rubber industry is a good “case” to weave together the development of different forms of labour with labour movements in general, and understand them as part of global labour history.

1. The transformations of interrelated divisions of labour that occurred in the rubber industry since its emergence.

2. The parallels and differences between rubber and cotton industries, and the respective roles of labour within each.

In Unit 2, we followed changes in the production and processing of cotton to understand how different kinds of workers were connected with one another through multiple divisions of labour—within and between firms, firms and households, and between countries. We saw that a key problem for employers was the mobilization and control of labour at costs compatible with their profit expectations. Finally, we saw that at various points in time, workers’ collective efforts to improve working conditions and wages led employers to search for cheaper ways to adopt and produce new technologies, resulting in not only a reorganization of labour processes within firms, but also to relocations to other areas as well. In this unit, we do the same with the “rubber case.” As with the cotton case, we will encounter different kinds of workers: sharecroppers, independent contractors, slaves, and wage workers. We will also see plantations and factories again. But unlike cotton, with rubber we will not see anything comparable to weavers working in their homes. Unlike cotton, rubber could not be processed in the home. On the contrary, throughout most of its history (and even in some parts of the world today) extracting rubber from the wilderness and developing the product on site was the dominant form of its production.

The parallels and differences between the cotton and rubber industries should give an idea why we go through the “looking at changing divisions of labour” exercise twice. This allows us to make comparisons and identify commonalities that point at the basic principles governing labour under capitalist relations of production; it also enables us to see specific forms in which these principles apply at different points in history, and indeed different places at the same points in time.

Though the 19th century is, in economic terms, often associated with steam engines and railways, the leading industry driving capitalism forward at the time was, without a doubt, the textile industry. In the 20th century, the leading industry was unequivocally the auto industry; and an essential part of that industry was, and continues to be, rubber. And while there are other key components that are essential to automobile manufacturing (steel, glass, aluminium), and perhaps equally indispensable in understanding the historical trends that comprise global labour today—especially when considered alongside what we learned about the cotton case in Unit 2—the story of rubber is absolutely fascinating.

Rubber: A Global History from Plantations to Synthetics

In The Devil’s Milk, John Tully shows how rubber—which was used for religious, recreational, and utilitarian purposes by people living in regions where rubber was naturally available—became an indispensable catalyst for industrial capitalism. Tully follows the trajectory of producing rubber from “wild rubber” (i.e., tapping trees in the jungle), to plantation and eventually synthetic rubber. Interwoven with the changes in producing rubber is the story of its various uses in industrial capitalism, with rubber tires being the most significant but by no means only use. However, this is a social, not a technical history. Therefore, Tully’s focus is on the different ways in which the production and processing of rubber was organized as part of the development of industrial capitalism. This development includes the colonization and dispossession of indigenous people in different parts of the world. Some of the dispossessed would find themselves producing rubber under despicable conditions, while others had to move elsewhere and seek other ways of making a living after being pushed off their lands. Among the places where the production of wild rubber led to dislocations and migrations were lands along the Putumayo River, the Amazon Basin, and the Congo. Tully also takes us to rubber plantations in Cambodia, Liberia, Malaya, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Nazi concentration camps in Poland, the latter of which were designed as massive industrial complexes to produce and process synthetic rubber. As much as Tully underscores the dark sides of the rubber industry, he also presents workers rising up against their exploitation. Most prominently in his account figure the union struggles of rubber workers in Akron, Ohio and the coolie revolt in Malaya.

Wild Rubber: A Primitive Mode of Extraction

Required Reading

The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber. Preface, Introduction, and Chapters 1–8

In the Preface and Introduction to The Devil’s Milk, Tully explains why a book on rubber might be of interest. After all, rubber is such an ordinary product that one does not think about it. It is just there, including in places one would never think of. Accordingly, Tully lists a good number of rubber’s uses in today’s world before turning to the natural distribution of rubber and the origin of its name and first usage by humans. The key point that he mentions is the industrial revolution, which led to growing demand for rubber and the invention of ever more different ways of using rubber products. This growing demand explains why the production of rubber moved from the collection of wild rubber to plantation rubber and eventually to synthetic rubber.

Chapters 1–3 chart the development of rubber from its pre-capitalist uses in Mesoamerica to a resource used in many products that were developed over the course of the development of industrial capitalism—most prominently, of course, pneumatic tires without which the 20th century automobile revolution likely would not have happened. Less prominent but still indispensable, rubber has been processed into hoses, driving belts in factories, waterproof garments, anesthetic equipment, catheters, hot water bottles, railway buffers, piston rings, electric insulation, seals and washers, rubber gloves, and condoms. Rubber was also indispensable in creating the first global communications systems as it was used for insulating the first transatlantic telegraph cable, laid in 1858. After demonstrating that rubber is, though often overlooked, rather ubiquitous, Tully, in Chapter 3, shifts the focus from the beneficial uses of rubber to what he calls rubber’s “dark side.” Coming from a First World country, Australia, and having been a rubber worker himself, he points at the sweat-shop conditions under which rubber was, and often still is, processed. He highlights low wages, long hours, and the health and safety problems caused by the use of chemicals, heat, dust, and noise prevalent in the rubber plants. And he points to workers fighting back, especially in “Part Three: Monopoly Capitalism in Akron,” where he digs deeper into these issues. At this juncture in the book, however, Tully links the appalling conditions in rubber processing in the industrialized First World with the worse conditions in rubber production throughout the colonial or Third World.

Chapters 4–6 take us to the Amazon basin and up the Putumayo River. The extraction of rubber in the area goes back to the 1820s, but the chapters’ focus is the rubber boom from around 1890 to 1920. The boom was triggered by increasing demand in the imperialist centres prior to WWI and ended with the world economic crisis in the aftermath of the war. Attempts to meet rising demand for rubber through hastily established plantations failed. Leaf blight quickly took over those plantations, likely because not enough time was spent to cultivate plants that could live in close proximity with each other. Plantation rubber, as later chapters will show, appeared much later on the other side of the world in a number of Asian countries. After the failure to produce plantation rubber, investors sought to scale up the extraction of wild rubber. Note the distinction that Tully makes between modes of production and, with regards to wild rubber, modes of extraction.

The over-extraction of wild rubber and drought destroyed both the fragile ecosystems and the livelihoods of peasant workers who signed on as rubber tappers. Legally, these workers were subcontractors, while in reality they were mired in debt-bondage at the pleasure of merchants who kept them there. Just to get to the plot where they were supposed to tap, workers had to buy tickets at prices none of them could pay. They started with debt and did not earn enough to pay it off. One of the reasons for this was that tappers did not have the time and land to engage in subsistence farming. This left them dependent on foods brought in at inflated prices—and from faraway places: Rice from Ragoon via Liverpool, dried cod from Europe via Hamburg, and beans from Argentina. Poor working conditions and the paltry income of de jure subcontractors and de facto debt-slaves were appalling and less than efficient. Rising demand and prices for rubber led investors to explore other options. Some came up with the forcible enslavement of indigenous people.

By the time of the rubber boom, countries around the Amazon basin and up the Putumayo River had legally abandoned slavery, but those laws were not enforced and indigenous people were traded and treated as slaves. Violence, ending up in genocide, escalated as slave labour turned out to be at least as ineffective as the combination of subcontracting and debt-bondage. Slaves had absolutely no economic incentive to work. For that reason, the use of slave labour relied on close supervision and coercion. However, supervising slaves on a jungle plantation was difficult, as supervisors were costly and could not have their eyes everywhere. Therefore, a reign of terror was established that was meant to make slaves work even without a supervisor nearby. Mutilations and murder brought unspeakable misery to the slaves. But it did not solve investors’ economic problems. Productivity remained low, and the brutal exploitation of slaves and nature devalued investors’ assets.

Another important matter you should take away from reading about work during the rubber boom is the boundary between slavery and free labour, “free” meaning that workers have the legal right and economic opportunity to choose whether or not to work as subcontractors or wage workers. The case of slaves along the Putumayo shows that a legal ban on slavery was not necessarily a protection against being enslaved. On the other hand, lack of other opportunities forced workers into slavery-like conditions without formally becoming slaves.

You should appreciate here that the conditions during the rubber boom were exemplary for many other cases of equally bad treatment of workers in the colonies or post-colonial states of Latin America, post-colonial states that, economically, existed under conditions of neocolonialism. If instead of looking at cotton and rubber, we would have chosen precious metals and diamonds, sugar, coffee, tea, or tropical fruits as case studies in learning about global labour history, we would have found the same range of appalling working conditions which, in many places, have continued to exist since the 16th century, when European powers began colonizing the world. For instance, the conditions of coltan mining in today’s Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the mineral’s main global suppliers, are not much better than those of rubber tapping some 100-plus years ago. Coltan is a mineral without which information technology, like the computer used to write this course, would not work.

Chapter 7 takes us to another site of enslavement, mutilations, and murders—the so-called Congo Free State—a special kind of colony (actually more a personal fiefdom of the Belgian King Leopold II) that was established following the 1884–1885 West Africa Conference in Berlin. At that conference other colonial powers gave Belgium the green light to take the Congo, and the Belgian king used the opportunity to turn the Congo into his own empire, just in time for the 1890 to 1920 rubber boom. Enslavement, torture, and working slaves to death were part of Leopold’s business model. Within 15 years, parts of the Congo saw their populations drop by as much as 60%.

Chapter 8 stresses an aspect that appeared in passing in the previous chapters: the ecological devastation caused by wild rubber tapping. The other aspect is the connection between seemingly backward methods of extraction with the most advanced technologies, as is exemplified by the relatively primitive and rudimentary old-world extraction of gutta-percha from Singapore being used to insulate submarine telegraph cables. This is the same sort of exploitative and brutal dualism that marks today’s mining of minerals for the development, manufacturing, and delivery of the world’s technology and communication industries. The chapter also moves the focus from the Third World’s production of rubber back to processing in the First World.

Study Questions

As you work through the required readings in this section, think about the following study questions:

1. What was rubber used for before the emergence of industrial capitalism? Which uses of rubber have been invented since industrial capitalism first emerged?

1. What triggered the rubber boom around 1890? Why did it end around 1920?

2. How did investors respond to the rubber boom?

3. What is the difference between wild rubber and plantation rubber?

4. What was the ecological impact of wild rubber extraction during the rubber boom? What does Tully mean by “mode of extraction”?

5. Which forms of control of labour were used in the Amazon basin, along the Putumayo River, and in the Congo?

6. In what ways did workers in wild rubber extraction resist exploitation and oppression?

7. Is there a clear-cut difference between slavery and sub-contracting?

8. Can you think of any cases of slavery and debt-bondage today?

Monopoly Capitalism in Akron

Required Reading

The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber. Chapters 9–11

Chapter 9 of The Devil’s Milk examines the rise of Akron, Ohio from small town to rubber capital of the United States in the period of 1870 to the 1930s, which overlaps with the rubber boom from 1890 to 1920 that marked the heyday of wild rubber extraction. The transformation of Akron was accompanied by the making of a local working class, miserable working conditions, heroic labour struggles, and eventually large-scale union organizing. By the end of the period, Akron was not only a rubber capital but also a union town. This transformation was slow until mass production and sales of automobiles started in the 1900s. By the end of WWI in 1918, 40% of global rubber was produced in Akron. The auto and rubber industries were highly concentrated, dominated, in fact, by a handful of companies, and at the forefront of standardization, de-skilling, and automation. Though automation meant that less labour was required to produce a given number of tires, demand for them grew quicker than productivity could keep up with. During the boom years, before and throughout WWI, jobs were poorly paid but they were plenty. So strong was the demand for workers that finding a job was easier than finding a place to sleep, as housing construction could not keep up with population growth in the city. No different from rubber tappers, workers in tire factories did not do the job because they liked it so much, but because they did not have much of an alternative. The rubber workforce in Akron was comprised of impoverished white farmers and black farm workers from the Southern US, immigrants from Europe, and some locals who took temporary jobs but went back to their nearby homes during the low season. As with other industries, the rubber industry in Akron was highly racialized, with black workers relegated to the dirtiest, unhealthiest, and lowest-paying jobs. And compounding these poor working conditions was a sizable contingent of racist whites, who moved to Akron to join the industry. The largest KKK chapter outside the Southern US was in Akron.

Chapter 10 presents the emergence of a labour movement in Akron. As in many other industries, the first unions organized only workers of a certain craft or skill, for example, mechanics, electricians, or carpenters. However, this kind of organizing did not have much to offer to workers in an industry like rubber, which was marked by the standardization of rapid de-skilling, low wages, speed-ups, and unhealthy working conditions. Another aspect noted in the chapter is the change in female employment. In the early days of the rubber industry, before standardization had really begun, women made up almost half of the workforce; by the end of the combined rubber-and-auto boom, the share of female workers, who competed with blacks for the more unpleasant and lower-paying jobs, was less than a third. While gender and colour divisions prevailed, the standardization of work and workers gave rise to industrial unionism in which all workers in an industry, no matter which job they did, pursued common interests. The chapter tells the story of the first incarnation of industrial unionism, pioneered by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and its defeat that gave the rubber barons another 20 years to run their companies without union interference.

Chapter 11 shows how Akron eventually became a union town. After the defeat of the IWW, the rubber barons tried to confine workers through various welfare and housing schemes and to enlist them into company unions run by their own enterprises. Rising wages during WWI, along with the banning of strikes, also helped to maintain labour peace. However, the depression that began after the stock market collapse in 1929 made clear to workers that neither welfare schemes nor unions run by the company would help them. As soon as employment picked up again, workers began joining unions on a massive scale. Divisions between craft and industrial unions resurfaced and companies tried to keep company unions in the game, but after workers amassed together and employed tactics such as sit-down strikes during which workers refused to leave company premises to avoid the deployment of strike-breakers, eventually unionism across the industry became pervasive in Akron.

Study Questions

As you work through the required readings in this section, think about the following study questions:

1. How and why did Akron become a rubber capital? What were working conditions like, and how did they change from the 1870s to the 1930s?

1. Who were the workers in Akron’s rubber industry? Where did they come from? What marks did race and gender leave on the workforce?

2. What is craft unionism? What is industrial unionism?

3. What led to the IWW strike in 1913? Why did it fail?

4. What led to a resurgence of unionism in the early 1930s? Why did strikes at that time succeed?

Agribusiness and Imperialism

Required Reading

The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber. Chapters 12–16

In the previous two sections, we saw that wild rubber delivered the raw material for the rubber boom from 1890 to 1920. We also saw that the processing of rubber led to the emergence of large corporations, class divisions, and struggles. Wild rubber never recovered from the end of the boom; when demand for rubber picked up again, it came from plantations. This section shows how plantation rubber took off after a long period of failed experiments. It will also examine how the rise of plantation rubber led to class divisions and struggles on the plantations.

Chapter 12 of The Devil’s Milk details the development of plantation rubber from early experimentation to breakthrough following the slump that followed the end of WWI. To do this, the chapter also takes a brief look at commodities like tobacco, coffee, and sugar, which began being produced on plantations long before rubber. The chapter also shows how plantation rubber, in a way, defeated itself: Once supplies from plantations started to grow, it did not take long until they outgrew demand. Falling prices put a lid on profitability, and the next rubber boom, during WWII, would see the breakthrough of synthetic rubber. The story of synthetic rubber will be told in the next section of this unit. Beyond explaining the economics of plantation rubber, chapter 12 also considers the politics around it, namely the role the colonial powers of Britain, France, and the Netherlands had on advancing rubber plantations in their respective colonies and the neocolonial policies the US pursued to the same end.

Chapter 13 delves into the planters’ world. It shows that much of the managerial work that was needed to be done was by assistants, while on large plantations in particular, the planters did not have much to do. Most of the assistants or managers were dedicated imperialists who considered the workers on the plantations as an inferior race. Many also had strong anti-union views, with some even being active in breaking the General Strike of 1926 in England. However, as hired managers they were also bound by the orders of their bosses which led, in some cases, to the founding of professional associations to articulate managers’ shared interests. Planters and managers lived in a white man’s world which, despite differences in terms of income, power, and status between planters and managers, included racial and gender privileges. As white men, they could have sexual relationships with women of colour, but non-whites were prone to severe punishment if they had, or were suspected to have, sexual relations with white women. The plantations were also surrounded by a burgeoning brothel industry where planters and managers could buy sex from prostitutes from local areas, as well as from sex workers who hailed from what were at that time impoverished Eastern European countries.

Chapter 14 details where rubber plantation labourers came from, how they were recruited, where they ended up working, and how difficult it was to retain them once there. Many places suitable for growing rubber trees were sparsely populated, and so to retain labourers there, many plantations afforded the indigenous inhabitants in these locations subsistence farming. Yet, local supplies of cheap labour were limited and so planters had to recruit from elsewhere. Recruiting plantation labourers cheaply and forcing them into backbreaking toil was no easy sale, especially when these labourers came from afar and were sent to relatively remote locations. Planters could only overcome this problem by attracting workers from other places, places devastated by droughts and famines or inhabited by large numbers of landless peasants. Ironically, such devastation was the direct result of colonization that destroyed previously existing economies. Immigration of cheap labourers often turned local populations into minorities. British planters were eager to divide and conquer their workforces, for example, by bringing Tamil and Chinese workers in that had to work under supervision of Sikhs or Malayans. Such racialized hiring practices go a long way in explaining racial hatred in the post-colonial world today. The chapter also shows different forms of labour that we already encountered in other places: free labourers, indentured labourers, and debt-bondage and tax-bondage.

Chapter 15 provides an account of conditions on the plantations. In some detail, it looks at the poor dietary, housing, and health conditions—and violence—suffered by the so-called “coolies.” The multiplicity of ugliness that shaped workers’ lives on the plantations produced many discontents, including spontaneous assaults on overseers and managers, sabotage, and desertion.

Chapter 16 surveys the different ways in which workers articulated the discontents found in chapter 15, which also included union organizing and strikes. In these organized forms of protest, economic and political demands—mostly aimed at national independence—intersected. Communists played key roles in organizing unions and strikes in Malaya and Indonesia. Most strikes were defeated by military force, which further fueled demands for national independence. The military forces of colonial powers were strong enough to defeat striking rubber workers but too weak to stop the Japanese invasion of large parts of Southeast Asia. This invasion cut Western powers off from much of their rubber supplies and triggered hurried attempts to develop and produce synthetic rubber, which was a key resource for WWII arms production. In fact, as the next section will show, the US and Britain entered a race for synthetic rubber against Nazi Germany, which did not have much access to natural rubber even before the war.

Study Questions

As you work through the required readings in this section, think about the following study questions:

1. Why did plantation rubber replace wild rubber? What were the economic limits of the production of plantation rubber?

1. What did planters do? What did managers do? What were the relations between planters and managers?

2. Which role did race and gender play on the plantations?

3. What were the working and living conditions on the plantations like?

4. Which forms of revolt did workers engage in to improve their conditions?

5. Which role did colonialism play in the revolts of plantation workers?

Synthetic Rubber, War, and Autarky

Required Reading

The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber. Chapters 17–21 and Epilogue

This final section on the rubber case deals with synthetic rubber, which marks a significant shift from the production of natural rubber that we looked at earlier in this unit. Remember that the rise of the rubber industry was reliant on developments in industrial capitalism, most notably the transition from railways to cars and trucks using pneumatic tires. These changes in industrial production went hand-in-hand with changing divisions of labour and the development and diffusion of new technologies. However, while workers in synthetic rubber processing eventually used cutting-edge technologies, the working and income conditions often resembled those from the early days of the cotton industry.

The technologies used to produce natural rubber, on the other hand, were anything but cutting edge. Wild rubber, as Tully shows, was simply extracted where it could be found. That is why he uses the term “mode of extraction” with regards to wild rubber. The methods of production used on rubber plantations in the first half of the 20th century were not much different from those used on cotton and sugar plantations of the 18th century. Technological stagnation in the colonial world was intertwined with technological progress in the imperial centres, which were also centres of industrial production. Synthetic rubber brought about a geographical shift of rubber production from the colonial, and sometimes post-colonial peripheries of capitalism to its centres. A major factor driving this shift was, as we will see in this section, world politics. Synthetic rubber also brought cutting-edge technology into rubber production. In the case of Nazi Germany, it also brought new forms of enslavement, mutilation, and murder. Harsh working and living conditions are often associated with backwardness. This section will show that this association is wrong. New technologies and the most brutal treatment of workers can go hand-in-hand.

Chapter 17 provides the context for the development of synthetic rubber production that goes back to WWI when German industries, cut off from natural rubber supplies by the British sea blockade, began looking for new alternatives. Yet, the major shift from natural to synthetic rubber came during WWII. Economic depression and the collapse of the world market had cut off Germany from rubber and many other imports years before the war. In fact, the rise of the Nazis and their autarky policies, including renewed efforts to produce synthetic rubber, were very much fuelled by the depression of the 1930s. In the race for synthetic rubber production the Nazis were joined by the US, who lost access to plantation rubber after the Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia, and the Soviets, whose access to imports was not only limited by the 1930s collapse of the world market, but also the boycott imposed by Western countries.

Chapters 18 and 19 take a closer look at the Nazis’ plans for building massive industrial capacities on the backs and lives of forced labour. The concentration-camp-industrial-complex in which workers who were deemed as racially inferior—and subsequently worked to death—should, according to Nazi plans, have been surrounded by German settlements on Eastern European lands cleansed of their original inhabitants. These equally grandiose and brutal plans never fully materialized, of course, as the Nazis lost the war against the forces of the anti-Hitler coalition.

Chapter 20 offers some background on the politics behind the development of synthetic rubber, especially in the Soviet Union, which developed this material very much on its own. In the US, development was delayed as agribusinesses pushed for plant-based alternatives rather than relying on importing plantation rubber. Based on agreements signed before the Nazis came to power, Standard Oil was more interested in patents co-owned with IG Farben, which was part of the concentration-camp-industrial-complex in occupied Poland, than in the production of synthetic rubber. Eventually, massive government funding got synthetic rubber production off the ground in a very short time.

Chapter 21 takes us back Akron, Ohio, where a combination of ballooning profits, wages trailing far behind the standard of living, and harsh working conditions led to labour unrest and eventually wildcat strikes. During the war, unions were legal, but strikes were banned. However, as the case of Goodyear shows, the legal right to organize was not recognized by all companies.

The Epilogue to The Devil’s Milk pulls together several threads running throughout the book and relates them to the world of rubber today. It points out that rubber plantations still exist, and still pay poverty wages. It also reminds us that the rubber industry very much developed in the tracks of the automobile industry and draws attention to the ecological impact of economies built around cars. The chapter ends with a brief homage to Chico Mendes, the unionist and environmentalist who campaigned against deforestation of the Amazon and who championed extractive reserves, which made possible a symbiosis between nature and the commercial sustainability of work and life that were essential to his and his fellow rubber tappers’ livelihoods.

Study Questions

As you work through the required readings in this section, think about the following study questions:

1. What led to the development and large-scale production of synthetic rubber? Who were the main actors in this development? What were their goals?

1. What did you learn about work in synthetic rubber? Which role did race play in it?

2. What did you learn about the ecological impact of the rubber industry?

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