Rubber and the Environment in Malaysia
The rise of the motor car created two very different commodity frontiers in the British Empire, one producing oil and the other rubber. The demand for rubber followed an often-repeated pattern in that it was shaped by scientific invention, technological change, and new patterns of consumption in the industrialized world. It was related directly to the development of new fossil fuels. Coal transformed shipping and overland transport by rail. Oil (Chapter 15) opened new realms for mobility. The invention in 1867 of the internal combustion engine by a German, Nikolaus Otto, and in 1885 of automobiles powered by gasoline-driven engines revolutionized transport, culture, and the South-East Asian environment. During the late nineteenth century, wild natural rubber booms swept through the tropical world, from Brazil to the Congo, leaving in their wake hardship and scandal. In Malaysia, there was a very different outcome—the development of plantations on a new capitalist agrarian frontier. Rubber became one of the single most important commodities produced in the Empire, and was enormously valuable to Britain not only for its own motor industry but also to sell to the United States. Whereas demand for some earlier imperial commodities was largely British, there was also significant consumption of rubber and oil in other parts of the Empire, especially the settler dominions. In the early decades of the twentieth century, rubber plantations, in parallel with expanding sugar production in Queensland, Natal, Trinidad, and Fiji, extended and intensified Britain’s engagement with the tropical zones of the world. Indentured workers replaced slaves as the major plantation workforce. South India was the major labour source for Malaysia, where the ports and tin-mining centres already had substantial Chinese communities. British colonialism in Malaysia left as its legacy a multi-ethnic society. By the 1930s about 55 per cent were indigenous Malays and Orang Asli, 35 per cent of Chinese origin, and close to 10 per cent Indian. Although capital was increasingly mobile by the late nineteenth century, extraction and production of the three major commodities of the twentieth century Empire proved to be highly location specific. Gold and oil were trapped in particular geological formations.