Abstract

"Yields and Costs: Performance Indicators and Imperial Renewal in British Malaya"

Siddharth Sridhar, University of Toronto (sid.sridhar@mail.utoronto.ca)

In the interwar years, Malayan rubber - critical to the automobile tire industry and industrial machinery in the USA and Europe - was subject to high volatility, depression, state intervention, and imperial and inter-imperial commodity controls. This was in part due to the hardiness of Havea brasiliensis, which could be productive for up to 35 years, and to the violent swings of the American auto industry which constituted 50 to 70% of global rubber demand. Rubber market volatility and the explosion of new competitors like the European estates and “native” smallholders of the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina led British rubber companies to focus on two performance indicators for the industry: yield per acre and costs of production.

In this paper, I show how these performance indicators became objects of concern under the immense competitive pressure faced by British Malayan rubber plantations in the 1920s. Between 1922 and 1928, British estates in Ceylon and Malaya restricted their exports of rubber in the Stevenson Restriction Scheme to raise world market prices. The resulting price spike encouraged massive investment in modern rubber plantations and smallholdings across Southeast Asia. Dutch and French competition forced the collapse of the scheme and led to significant overproduction when the Great Depression hit Asia in 1929. In this context, both yields per acre and costs of production were closely tracked by planters, rubber companies, the Rubber Growers’ Association, the British Malayan state, and the International Rubber Regulation Committee, following the International Rubber Regulation Agreement in 1934. Both indicators became targets of colonial and imperial intervention, with the Malayan state investing heavily in rubber research and supporting efforts to depress wages through migration management. Performance indicators became objects of scientific management, public knowledge, and state intervention, in the interest of profit and imperial security.