A World History of Rubber

By Stephen L. Harp,

Book cover of A World History of Rubber: Empire, Industry, and the Everyday

Book description

A World History of Rubber helps readers understand and gain new insights into the social and cultural contexts of global production and consumption, from the nineteenth century to today, through the fascinating story of one commodity.

Divides the coverage into themes of race, migration, and labor; gender on plantations and…

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Why read it?

1 author picked A World History of Rubber as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

As Harp says, “…confronting the realities of the past will make us wiser, better-informed global citizens in the future.”

He tells us about rubber tree seeds stolen from trees in Brazil that allowed British rubber plantations to thrive in the Far East where they provided a British monopoly of rubber during WWI when rubber made its mark as a ‘must have’ for the war machine.

Rubber collected in the wild in Brazil and the Congo set the stage for the early development of this miracle substance that would eventually waterproof the world. Then in 1904 an international campaign exposed the…

From John's list on plants that changed the world.

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Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

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