The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber, by John Tully, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011. $25.00, pp. 416.
Silvertown: The Lost Story of a Strike that Shook London and Helped Launch the Modern Labor Movement, by John Tully, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014. $29.00, pp. 267.
John Callaghan
In both of these books John Tully gives us histories of remarkable businesses and their human consequences seen from the vantage point of a red–green critic of capitalism. Rubber and its cousin gutta-percha were exploited long before plantation businesses sprang up. Manaus in Brazil developed on the back of the wild rubber industry, which expanded from the first half of the 19th century as commercial uses for the product were identified and vulcanization was discovered in the USA and Britain. Tully is interested in all aspects of this history — from the natural distribution of rubber trees, to the chemistry of vulcanization and synthetic rubber, the multiple uses of rubber, the business conglomerates that grew from the automobile revolution, to the appalling conditions of the workers employed in its extraction and application. He writes with a talent for engaging the reader…
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