Includes bibliographical references (pages 184-200) and index.
CONTENTS NOTE
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Chapter 1 Requiem for the Amazon rubber boom -- chapter 2 This substance called rubber: Hevea and its relations -- chapter 3 Anthropological rubber in the Amazon -- chapter 4 Postcards from El Dorado: An overview of historical accounts of the rubber industry -- chapter 5 Embedded tropes and the shift of time -- chapter 6 Failure as a stage of modernization: Part 1: narratives of failure -- chapter 7 Failure as a stage of modernization: part 2: modernity redux, the failure of Fordlandia -- chapter 8 After the wild frontier -- chapter 9 The melancholy and the modern -- chapter 10 Rubber in London -- chapter 11 Concluding comments.
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
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"In this engaging book, Stephen Nugent offers the first in-depth historical anthropology of the most widely recognised feature of the Amazonian region - the dramatic rise and fall of the Amazon rubber industry, Examining rubber in the Amazon from the perspective of a long-term extractive industry that linked remote forest tappers to technical innovations central to the industrial transformation of Europe and North America, the book emphasizes the links between the social landscape of Amazonia and the global economy. It challenges widely held assumptions about the hyper-naturalism of the 'lost world' of the Amazon where 'the challenge of the tropics' is still to be faced and the 'frontiers of development' are still to be settled. Through a critical examination focused around the rubber industry, Nugent addresses myths that continue to influence perceptions of Amazonia. This book should be required reading for all those interested in the Amazon, and will be relevant to scholars of anthropology, political ecology, geography, history of Latin America, the industrial revolution, and development studies."--Provided by publisher.