When the British did attempt to restrict production in the s, the United States attempted to set up plantations in Brazil and the Dutch were happy to take market share. Yet it was too late for Brazil: the cost structure of Southeast Asian plantations could not be matched. In a sense, then, the game was no longer worth the candle: in order to compete in rubber production, Brazil would have to have had significantly lower wages — which would only have been possible with a vastly expanded transport network and domestic agriculture sector in the hinterland of the Amazon basin.
One disadvantage Brazilian rubber producers suffered was that the organization of production depended on the distribution of Hevea brasiliensis trees in the forest.
The owner or often lease concessionary of a large land plot would hire tappers to gather rubber by gouging the tree trunk with an axe. In Brazil, the usual practice was to make a big dent in the tree and put a small bowl to collect the latex that would come out of the trunk. Rubber could only be collected during the tapping season August to January , and the living conditions of tappers were hard. As the need for rubber expanded, tappers had to be sent deep into the Amazon rainforest to look for unexplored land with more productive trees.
After collecting the rubber, tappers would go back to their shacks and smoke the resin in order to make balls of partially filtered and purified rough rubber that could be sold at the ports.
There is much discussion about the commercialization of the product. Weinstein argues that the seringalista — the employer of the rubber tapper — controlled the transportation of rubber to the ports, where he sold the rubber, many times in exchange for goods that could be sold with a large gain back to the tapper. Wages depended on the current price of rubber; the usual agreement for tappers was to split the gross profits with their patrons.
These salaries were most commonly paid in goods, such as cigarettes, food, and tools. According to Weinstein , the goods were overpriced by the seringalistas to extract larger profits from the seringueiros work. Barham and Coomes , on the other hand, argue that the structure of the market in the Amazon was less closed and that independent traders would travel around the basin in small boats, willing to exchange goods for rubber.
Poor monitoring by employers and an absent state facilitated these under-the-counter transactions, which allowed tappers to get better pay for their work. From the ports, rubber was in the hands of mainly Brazilian, British and American exporters. Contrary to what Weinstein argued, Brazilian producers or local merchants from the interior could choose whether to send the rubber on consignment to a New York commission house, rather than selling it to a exporter in the Amazon Shelley, Rubber was taken, like other commodities, to ports in Europe and the US to be distributed to the industries that bought large amounts of the product in the London or New York commodities exchanges.
A large part of rubber produced was traded at these exchanges, but tire manufacturers and other large consumers also made direct purchases from the distributors in the country of origin.
The Hevea brasiliensis , the most important type of rubber tree, was an Amazonian species. This is why the countries of the Amazon basin were the main producers of rubber at the beginning of the international rubber trade.
How, then, did British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia end up dominating the market? Brazil tried to prevent Hevea brasiliensis seeds from being exported, as the Brazilian government knew that by being the main producers of rubber, profits from rubber trading were insured. Protecting property rights in seeds proved a futile exercise. In a case of 22 plants reached Singapore and were planted at the Singapore Botanical Garden. In the same year the first plant arrived in the Malay States.
Since rubber trees needed between 6 to 8 years to be mature enough to yield good rubber, tapping began in the s. In order to develop rubber extraction in the Malay States, more scientific intervention was needed.
In , H. Ridley was appointed director of the Singapore Botanical Garden and began experimenting with tapping methods. The final result of all the experimentations with different methods of tapping in Southeast Asia was the discovery of how to extract rubber in such a way that the tree would maintain a high yield for a long period of time.
Rather than making a deep gouge with an axe on the rubber tree, as in Brazil, Southeast Asian tappers scraped the trunk of the tree by making a series of overlapped Y-shaped cuts with an axe, such that at the bottom there would be a canal ending in a collecting receptacle.
Commercial planting in the Malay States began in The development of large-scale plantations was slow because of the lack of capital. Investors did not get interested in plantations until the prospects for rubber improved radically with the spectacular development of the automobile industry.
By , European capitalists were sufficiently interested in investing in large-scale plantations in Southeast Asia to plant some 38, acres of trees. Between and the annual increase was over 70, acres per year, and, by the end of , the acreage in the Malay States reached , Baxendale, The expansion of plantations was possible because of the sophistication in the organization of such enterprises.
Joint stock companies were created to exploit the land grants and capital was raised through stock issues on the London Stock Exchange. The high returns during the first years made investors ever more optimistic and capital flowed in large amounts. Plantations depended on a very disciplined system of labor and an intensive use of land. In addition to the intensive use of land, the production system in Malaysia had several economic advantages over that of Brazil.
First, in the Malay States there was no specific tapping season, unlike Brazil where the rain did not allow tappers to collect rubber during six months of the year.
Second, health conditions were better on the plantations, where rubber companies typically provided basic medical care and built infirmaries. In Brazil, by contrast, yellow fever and malaria made survival harder for rubber tappers who were dispersed in the forest and without even rudimentary medical attention. Finally, better living conditions and the support of the British and Dutch colonial authorities helped to attract Indian labor to the rubber plantations.
Japanese and Chinese labor also immigrated to the plantations in Southeast Asia in response to relatively high wages Baxendale, Initially, demand for rubber was associated with specialized industrial components belts and gaskets, etc. Prior to the development of the automobile as a mass-marketed phenomenon, the Brazilian wild rubber industry was capable of meeting world demand and, furthermore, it was impossible for rubber producers to predict the scope and growth of the automobile industry prior to the s.
Thus, as Figure 3 indicates, growth in demand, as measured by U. There was no reason to believe, in the early s, that demand for rubber would explode as it did in the s. Even as demand rose in the s with the bicycle craze, the rate of increase was not beyond the capacity of wild rubber producers in Brazil and elsewhere see figure 3.
High rubber prices did not induce rapid increases in production or plantation development in the nineteenth century. In this context, Brazil developed a reasonably efficient industry based on its natural resource endowment and limited labor and capital sources.
In the first three decades of the twentieth century, major changes in both supply and demand created unprecedented uncertainty in rubber markets. On the supply side, Southeast Asian rubber plantations transformed the cost structure and capacity of the industry. On the demand side, and directly inducing plantation development, automobile production and associated demand for rubber exploded. Then, in the s, competition and technological advance in tire production led to another shift in the market with profound consequences for rubber producers and tire manufacturers alike.
The movements from to were very volatile on a monthly basis, as well, thus complicating forecasts for producers and making it hard for producers to decide how to react to market signals.
Even though the information of prices and amounts in the markets were published every month in the major rubber journals, producers did not have a good idea of what was going to happen in the long run. If prices were high today, then they wanted to expand the area planted, but since it took from 6 to 8 years for trees to yield good rubber, they would have to wait to see the result of the expansion in production many years and price swings later.
Since many producers reacted in the same way, periods of overproduction of rubber six to eight -odd years after a price rise were common. The years and marked historic highs for rubber prices, only to be surpassed briefly in and The area planted in rubber throughout Asia grew from 15, acres in to , acres in ; these plantings matured circa , and cultivated rubber surpassed Brazilian wild rubber in volume exported.
Naugatuck Emerges as Industry Hub It would take Goodyear several more years to recreate the chemical formula and perfect the process of mixing sulfur and rubber at a high temperature; he patented the process in , the year after establishing the Naugatuck India-Rubber Company in Naugatuck. Goodyear, Charles. New York, NY, issued June 15, New Haven: Charles Goodyear, Boston, CT: The Firm, Slack, Charles.
Mangan, Gregg. On This Day in Connecticut History. Charleston, SC: History Press, Geer, William Chauncey. The Reign of Rubber. New York: The Century Company, Peirce, Bradford K. Fox and the Golden Age of Department Stores. Nicholas Grillo and his Thornless Rose. Harvested from a plant, these ancient peoples formed balls with the substance, and used these balls for primitive bouncing games. Although games were the primary use for rubber at the time, traces of the substance have also been found in the construction of metal and stone tools, used mainly to hold these materials to a wooden handle.
Over time these early humans discovered that rubber was waterproof, and could be used to create water resistant clothing. When Europeans first came in contact with rubber, they were so shocked by its properties they thought it was witchcraft. However, by rubber had been introduced into English society by Joseph Priestley. He had noticed that rubber was able to rub out pencil markings, therefore giving it the name "rubber".
As its consumption grew in these Western countries, the demand for the product intensified.
0コメント