Rubber boom
The rubber boom is the period from the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century in the Amazon region in South America , when the tropical rainforests of the area were opened up for the use of the rubber tree growing there due to the rapidly increasing demand for rubber . The rubber boom was associated with many sacrifices for the indigenous population, who were forced into compulsory labor, and ended around 1920 when rubber plants smuggled into Asia began to mature.
requirements
The resin of the rubber tree ( Hevea brasiliensis ) has been collected by the indigenous people of South and Central America for centuries, as natural rubber, due to its elastic properties, can be used for various purposes, such as for balls in traditional ball games.
The discovery of vulcanization by Charles Goodyear led after 1839 to a huge growth in demand for rubber for the industry in Europe and North America. Soon rubber was an important raw material for many products of industrialization . Rubber was used for raincoats and shoes, later also for bicycle tires and finally for car tires. Rubber was also used in railway and mechanical engineering and as an insulator in the electrical industry.
Rubber production
The rubber was collected from wild rubber trees in the tropical rainforests of Amazonia . For this purpose, the bark was scratched and the slowly flowing resin was collected in buckets. The resin was thickened in local factories and then bought up by wholesalers who shipped the rubber to North America and Europe.
The wholesalers gave regional dealers and these in turn gave the rubber collectors advances in money and goods, which they had to repay with corresponding amounts of rubber and thus became debtors. Indigenous peoples were also equipped with weapons, for which they had to capture a number of members of hostile tribes as slave labor. So were bonded labor and direct gunpoint important means of maintaining work.
In the rubber production in the Amazon one was dependent on the growth in the natural habitat trees: the system of rubber plantations encountered problems because the parasitic Rußtaupilz Microcyclus ulei in monoculture that killed grown rubber trees.
The rubber boom in Peru
The commercial use of rubber in the rainforests of Peru began around 1832. Initially, Moyobamba was the most important center of the rubber trade in eastern Peru, until the rapidly growing city of Iquitos on the Peruvian Amazon, the capital of the newly formed Loreto department , took over this role in 1870 . In order to develop the labor force of the indigenous Amazonia, laws and ordinances were enacted that also provided for forced labor, for example in a decree of the sub-prefect of Moyobamba of September 12, 1832, which included nudity, laziness, the terrible misery and lack of Civilization of the Indians is established. Rubber traders divided the jungle region of Peru among themselves and controlled huge areas with their armed private armies, where they also used armed force to force the indigenous population to collect natural rubber in the forests. Probably the greatest "rubber baron" of Peru was Julio César Arana , who opened his first company in Yurimaguas in 1881 and founded the Peruvian Amazon Company in 1889 with British capital . He finally controlled an area of about 113,000 km² in the region around the Putumayo , in which he stopped his indigenous slave laborers to work by armed men. Over 30,000 people, mostly Boras and Huitotos , perished in this area alone between 1881 and 1915 from disease and abuse. Another important "rubber baron" of Peru was Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald , who in 1888 was considered the richest rubber producer on the Ucayali . For the "rubber baron" Fitzcarrald, it was armed Asháninka (then known as Campa ) and Piros who captured the "wild" Mashcos ( Amarakaeri , Toyoeri ) and turned them into forced labor. In 1913, of a total of 28,000 indigenous workers in the Peruvian Amazon, 22,000 were employed as rubber collectors.
Rise of the City of Manaus
In the Empire of Brazil , the city of Manaus on the Amazon was the most important center for the production and trade in rubber . Around 1890 the small village of Manaus became a world famous and rich city with wide streets, an electric tram and electric street lights.
The rubber boom was shaped by the extravagant lifestyle of the rubber barons. The image of lighting a cigar with banknotes became known through this. Waldemar Scholz appropriated a lion, a motorboat and a yacht. Another baron had a palace built for his horses, which became so imposing that he moved in himself. Up to five percent foreigners lived in Manaus during the boom.
The high point of the extravagance was the construction of the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus. As a large opera house in the middle of the Amazon , it consists largely of imported building materials, including Italian marble. This construction cost about two million dollars, an enormous sum for the time.
End of the rubber boom
The rubber boom ended twenty years after Henry Wickham was commissioned by Joseph Hooker in 1876 to collect seeds from the rubber tree . Henry Wickham managed to collect over 70,000 seeds from which over 2,000 small trees grew in greenhouses in London and were first shipped to British Malaya . Only 8 rubber plants made the long crossing, which to this day form the basis for all rubber plantations in Southeast Asia. Beginning in 1910, the price of rubber fell, causing panic among the rubber barons. Asia had broken up Brazil's monopoly that had existed until then , thereby ending the rubber boom.
Today , synthetic materials are available for most of the purposes for which natural rubber was initially used. However, the sidewalls of car tires and aircraft tires in particular are made from natural rubber, since enormous forces act there, which synthetic rubbers do not offer sufficient resistance. The running surfaces, on the other hand, are abrasion surfaces and are vulcanized on from synthetic rubber by common manufacturers.
literature
- Luisa Abad González: Etnocidio y resistencia en la Amazonía peruana . Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha , Cuenca 2003.
- Andrew Gray: Peru: Freedom and Territory. Slavery in the Peruvian Amazon . In: Anti-Slavery International , International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) (ed.): Enslaved Peoples in the 1990s: Indigenous Peoples, Debt Bondage and Human Rights . Copenhagen 1997, pp. 183-215.
- Michael Michael Fobes Brown, Eduardo Fernández: War of shadows: the struggle for utopia in the Peruvian Amazon. University of California Press , Berkeley and Los Angeles (California) 1991.
Web links
- Gertraud Seiser and Elke Mader (University of Vienna): The rubber boom in the Amazon region
- Roberto Pineda Camacho et al .: La fiebre del caucho y los crímenes del Putumayo . Boletín temático Servindi Nº 67, October 2012, Lima.
- Rita Shannon Koeser (September 2003): Brazil - When El Dorado Was Here ( Memento from October 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b S. Varese 1973: La Sal de los Cerros. Una Aproximación al Mundo Campa . Ediciones Retablo de Papel, Lima. P. 247.
- ^ Andrew Gray: Enslaved Peoples in the 1990s. Indigenous Peoples, Debt Bondage and Human Rights . P. 189.
- ^ Claude Lévi-Strauss : Sad tropics . Pp. 357-368.
- ↑ F. Feldmann, JP Silva Jr., AVR Jayaratne: Use of arbuscular mycorrhiza in tree nurseries in the tropics using the example of the rubber tree Hevea spp. Notices from the Biological Federal Institute 363, pp. 83–92. ( Full text ( Memento from August 31, 2007 in the Internet Archive ))
- ↑ a b Luisa Abad González: Etnocidio y resistencia en la Amazonía peruana , p. 174.
- ↑ Decreto proclamado por el Subprefecto Rengifo en Moyobamba el 12 de septiembre de 1832, Artículo 17. In: Luisa Abad González: Etnocidio y resistencia en la Amazonía peruana, p. 174.
- ↑ Luisa Abad González: Etnocidio y resistencia en la Amazonía peruana , p. 173.
- ↑ Michael Fobes Brown, Eduardo Fernández: War of Shadows - The Struggle for Utopia in the Peruvian Amazon , p. 63 f.