The Devil's Milk

"A wonderfully fascinating social history of rubber's terrors (including slavery and Nazi extermination camps) and pleasures (condoms, among others). Tully is an insightful historian and he narrates this centuries-long account of a commodity as essential to the modern world as oil or steel with great passion and compassion." Greg Grandin, author, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City; professor of history, New York University

"John Tully has done an extraordinary job tying together the disparate elements-historical, geographical, sociological, anthropological of the rubber industry. He provides a deft treatment of a complicated and typically overlooked natural (and synthetic) resource that remains fundamental to the world economy. I strongly recommend it. John Borsos, vice-president, National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW)

Capital, as Marx once wrote, comes into the world "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." He might well have been describing the long, grim history of rubber. From the early stages of primitive accumulation to the heights of the industrial revolution and beyond, rubber is one of a handful of commodities that has played a crucial role in shaping the modern world, and yet laboring people around the globe have every reason to regard it as "the devil's milk." All the advancements made possible by rubber industrial machinery, telegraph technology, medical equipment, countless consumer goods have occurred against a backdrop of seemingly endless exploitation, conquest, slavery, and war. But, as John Tully reminds us, the vast terrain of rubber production has always been a site of struggle, and the oppressed who toil closest to "the devil's milk" in all its forms have never accepted their immiscration without a fight.

This book, the product of exhaustive scholarship carried out in many countries and on several continents, is destined to become a classic. With the skill of a master historian and the elegance of a novelist, Tully presents what amounts to a history of the modern world told through the multiple lives of rubber.