Abstract

“The Most Modern Way”: Reinventing Malayan Rubber during the Great Depression

In the depths of the Slump, with London rubber prices at 6.5 pence per pound and dropping, fewer than 15% of Sterling Rubber Companies showed a profit and 80% were selling rubber under their cost of production. As British and Dutch metropolitan politicians and colonial officials debated the merits of export controls, planters in Malaya wondered if their hitherto European industry would pass into the hands of natives like so many other tropical agricultural commodities. In 1934, combined action by the British, Dutch, and French Empires turned natural rubber into a cartel commodity with strict controls on exports, aiming at a “remunerative price for the efficient producer.” Economists like P.T. Bauer (1948) and K.E. Knorr (1946) decried the International Rubber Regulation Agreement as an imperial plot to protect metropolitan investors causing stagnant yields and a decadent industry. Historians C. Barlow (1978) and J.H. Drabble (1991) concurred, noting the primary goal and success of regulation in freezing the distribution of the industry among European investors and Malay smallholders where it stood in 1934. Distributional effects notwithstanding, the industry was fundamentally transformed in the 1930s. Though export regulation resulted in stagnating yields on European rubber estates, the industry saw a new orientation of European management, significant investment in public-private scientific institutions, and long term capital improvement in the development of higher quality planted material. In this paper, I argue that the efforts, sometimes at cross purposes, of investors, managers, and government officials to pilot the rubber industry through the 1930s and 1940s led to a reinvention of rubber from a pioneer crop to a product of sustained scientific intervention and coordinated management across firms, states, and even empires.