Hidden Connections: The Global History of Jungle Commodities

Abstract

This article reconsiders the production of tropical forest commodities during the industrial age. It argues that writing the global history of jungle commodities requires combining an analysis of local production with larger histories of trans-local interaction and exchange. To that end, this article exposes the nineteenth- and twentieth-century production connections between jungle frontiers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and industries and research laboratories in Europe and North America. While tropical forests are usually seen as places of basic raw material extraction, this article alternatively presents them as complex technological landscapes, where production is entangled with chemical, consumer, electrical, and pharmaceutical industries. Significant accounts of tropical forest labor activities shed light on what techniques and skills were required for producing vital global commodities and how these changed over time.

Introduction

In her 2013 book Scramble for the Amazon, Susanna Hecht argued that nineteenth-century European expeditions in the Amazonia rested on the "invisible" knowledge of local peoples in this rainforest.¹ Although rarely acknowledged, natives' skills and information "provided the logistics and intellectual foundations" for European naturalists and collectors' activities in jungle frontiers, she wrote. Something similar occurred with the extraction and processing of tropical forest commodities in the industrial age. The knowledge and work of forest dwellers in the tropical world played an essential part in the origins of global chemical, consumer, and pharmaceutical industries. Local tools and knowledge were essential for the commodification of nontimber jungle substances like cinchona, rubber, shellac, gutta-percha, camphor, and chicle as global goods. These tropical substances—and the local knowledge and labor embedded in their exploitation—helped revolutionize the use of materials for industrial and domestic consumption.² The exploitation of jungle commodities also fostered scientific inquiry and applied research in industrial chemistry, economic botany, and tropical forestry.

We need to acknowledge the tight—and often hidden and turbulent—production connections between jungles and industries as well as their implications for commodity cycles, environmental transformations, and labor exploitation.³ Building on critical histories of technology by, among others, David Edgerton, Francesca Bray, and Lissa Roberts, and global studies on commodities of tropical forest origin, particularly by Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Kaori O'Connor, Daniel Headrick, and Ian Inkster, this article critically reexamines the globalization of tropical forest products in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴

This article's emphasis is on production processes within the framework of commodity history, not consumption or trade. It provides clues to how an alternative global history of jungle commodity production might look. Reconstructing how tropical substances made their way from tropical forests to industries requires a sustained focus on technical processes, skills, and forms of expertise, as well as environmental conditions. Historians have concentrated increasingly on agricultural production, but conducted comparatively little research on the commodification of resources in wild forests or more diverse agroforestry systems.⁵ Despite its importance, research on the production of jungle commodities has been eclipsed by studying plantation crops that represented very different production regimes and knowledge cultures. Deliberately drawing attention to the mechanical and chemical transformations of forest materials throughout the commodity chain reveals the actors involved in the extraction, processing, transportation, manufacturing, and distribution of forest products.⁶

Placing forest technologies and skills at the center of global commodity histories helps recover the agency of subaltern actors. Jungle workers—often suffering violent and exploitative conditions—set in motion major material transformations of the industrial age. Remarkably, however, historical studies have consistently overlooked the labor and knowledge required for extracting and processing commodities in tropical forests, casting them as a place of raw materials, but not embedded in technology. Likewise, investigating jungle commodity research and manufacturing in the Global North is a way to reexamine situated labor practices in the factory and the laboratory.⁷ This article goes beyond a call to uncover marginalized labor. It argues that a range of mediators—from scientific travelers to intermediary contractors—connected the realms of the jungle, the factory, and the laboratory. Examining the translation process reveals how technical and environmental knowledge was scaled up and made useful for industries and scientific research.

This article reflects on the value of studying shifting production interconnections between tropical forests and manufacturing industries and suggests some research strategies and historical sources to do so. This reflection involves looking at historical examples of jungle commodities and how historians approached them. A central argument here is that the more closely we examine the historical production modes in tropical forests, the more these ecosystems emerge as what Francesca Bray calls "technological landscapes"—spaces where a wide range of techniques, skills, and materials were used.⁸ Delving deeper into the history of key jungle-sourced materials exemplifies what gets lost if we ignore jungle production modes, and underlines how jungle frontiers and global industries shaped each other.

Entangled Histories of Production

The so-called "industrial age" marked a time of mechanical innovations and energy transition. It also revolutionized the use of materials. Samuel Record, a professor at Yale's School of Forestry, described this in 1924: "The vast, but little known, forest resources of the tropics are beginning to command attention as never before in the history of the world. The inhabitants of temperate regions have known the tropical forests chiefly as resources of rare and fancy woods and special products, but they are now turning to them for materials for everyday use."⁹

Fig 1.

Tropical forest dwellers' labor and processing knowledge were essential for the commodification of jungle substances, like chicle for chewing gum. A juxtaposition: (L.) Chicle production in Belize (1934), and (R.) Chicle refining at an American Chicle Company plant (1923). (Sources: "Chicle 'ready for molding,' December 15, 1934, British Honduras," Pan-American Photograph Collection, Baker Library, Harvard University; "Chicle refining at American Chicle Company plant (1923)," Library of Congress.)

Indeed, the general narrative—sometimes overlooking local agency, unequal exchanges, and resource struggles—tells us that industrialization triggered a demand for jungle materials, prized for their chemical and physical properties. To be sure, the substances extracted from tropical trees were increasingly used for products like machine belts, cosmetics, gloves, drugs, and jewelry. As a result, humid forests in the tropical world—"anonymous" lands from the European perspective until the eighteenth century—became commodification zones. Many of the jungle commodities introduced between the 1850s and 1950s are now almost forgotten, but they were at one time considered essential for industrialization and consumption, playing key roles in times of war and colonial expansion.¹⁰ Histories of jungle resources tend to concentrate on their incorporation as "raw" or "basic" materials into new manufacturing processes in industrial centers. These studies ignore the actual extraction and processing of these resources in jungles, mostly highlighting how distant chemical and mechanical breakthroughs in Europe and the United States created a demand for tropical materials and how industries developed botanical and artificial substitutes.¹¹ From this incomplete perspective, the globalization of tropical forest commodities was driven solely by Global North industries and consumer demand for plastics, lubricants, fibers, colorants, and food.

This article proposes an alternative narrative that uncovers the dynamics of production in tropical forests and manufacturing industries in the same tableau—one without the preconception that one space is technologically more advanced than the other. It thus calls for bringing both sites—jungles in the Global South and industry in the Global North—into one analytical focus. Such an approach reveals the newly created exchanges and linkages that anchored both sites during the industrial age. It also yields an understanding of their mutual, if often unintended, dependences and synchronicities.¹² Such a comparative and connected history of production requires a "trans-local" approach, firmly rooted in situated microhistorical research on tropical forest regions.¹³

A bottom-up focus on commodity extraction and processing in the tropical world, moreover, highlights forest workers' expertise and reveals its fundamental role for global industries and research laboratories. Studying the persistence of traditional forest techniques in the globalization of jungle products is a counterpoint to innovation-focused narratives.¹⁴ The commodification of jungle materials was not only down to technological breakthroughs in European and American industries, but also thanks to "native" and "creole" technologies and the active participation of expert labor. These activities, however, are far more difficult to document in traditional archives than the institutional histories of industries and laboratories.

A focus on the production of tropical forest commodities destabilizes Eurocentric and U.S.-centric narratives of industrialization and research. Since the nineteenth century, if not before, jungles have been changing landscapes of global commodity production in which several actors, from local peasants to migrants, extracted and processed vital substances for the industrializing West. By focusing on the agency—and sometimes collaboration—of local and foreign actors working under specific environmental conditions, scholars are in the position to rewrite the early histories of tropical botany and bioprospecting in more inclusive ways.¹⁵

For more inclusive histories, we also need research into how manufacturing tropical tree substances and by-products led to intense scientific investigation and botanical experimentation from the nineteenth century onward.¹⁶ Tropical botany developments regarding tree taxonomies and planting procedures, such as for lactic plants (rubber, chicle, and gutta-percha), relied on or were informed by local, indigenous knowledge. Similarly, herbariums of tropical trees and tropical forestry programs in North American and European universities were built on the knowledge stored in tropical zones.¹⁷ Moreover, we need further exploration on how changes in the land use of tropical forests, ranging from wild foraging to plantations, involved the transfer of extraction and processing techniques. Such production changes required local environmental expertise on species selection, weeding, choice of planting locations, and seasonal patterns.

Easier to find in the archives is documentation of industries and research laboratories in Europe and the United States during the period 1850–1950. Trade and scientific journals are particularly relevant historical sources on tropical forest commodities and their manufacturing, like India Rubber Word, the Journal of Forestry, and Chemical Age. Many monographs, reports, and treatises on jungle commodities appeared after 1900. One example is Tropical Forests of the Caribbean, written in 1931 by forestry expert Tom Gill, who became president of the International Society of Tropical Foresters.¹⁸ The chemistry and morphology of the different substances—in particular natural polymers—generated a great deal of interest from experts in governments, universities, private institutes, and companies, including the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, and the American Chemical Society.

Another fruitful research avenue is to study how engineers, physicists, and chemists at industrial companies experimented with jungle substances and their manufacturing. Corporate research in the early twentieth century included identifying the molecular structures of various tropical substances, the standardization of final products, routine laboratory testing, and patent management.¹⁹ Expert laborers measured the purity and quality of jungle materials with a battery of chemical procedures, even at forest camps or near the extraction areas. Production constraints and chronic supply crises (in quantity or price) of valuable forest products, due to ecological limitations, inaccessibility, logistics, and overexploitation, soon sparked a race among chemists to find substitutes. The search for and invention of artificial substitutes eventually caused industries and consumers to lose interest in many jungle resources, to the point that many became obsolete. Substitutes freed some industries from their dependence on tropical forest products, but they were not always satisfactory. Industrial experts' efforts to replace natural substances are well-documented in European and U.S. patent offices, as well as in business records and technical journals. To date, however, there are no systematic studies of the former issue. Beyond the primary sources and scholarship challenges lies a methodological one.

Tropical Forests as Production Landscapes

Tropical forests are home to an enormous variety of resources with potential industrial, pharmaceutical, and commercial applications. Yet tropical forests are commonly imagined as primitive and isolated places without significant human activities or material culture. Even today, the popular perception persists of tropical forests as pristine natural environments in need of conservation and with no economic activity.²⁰ As anthropologists and archaeologists have shown for a long time, even the most inaccessible and remote jungles have historically been anthropogenic landscapes.²¹ Indeed, tropical forests are living and social environments peopled by diverse societies who use their natural resources and understand the ecological complexities of interacting with animals and plants. Before extractive booms further opened up their habitats in the nineteenth century, many forest societies had already experienced profound cultural and material changes. Indigenous societies populating tropical forests were "neo-traditional," to use anthropologist Marshall Sahlins's expression, meaning they had been influenced and changed by previous intercultural settlements.²²

The history of jungle workspaces has been largely erased or is little known. Historians tend to take the location, extraction, processing, and movement of tropical forest resources for granted, without considering the technologies and skills involved. One possible explanation for this oversight is the stereotypical view of jungle techniques as traditional and backward, and of jungle workers as "savage" and "exotic." But the lack of detailed understanding concerning the technologies and skills of extraction, processing, and logistics in tropical forests also speaks to the difficulty of accessing widely dispersed historical sources—travelers' accounts, censuses, administrative documents, colonial governments' reports, and business records, to name a few. Furthermore, due to the dearth of written accounts of jungle techniques, research requires more difficult-to-obtain ethnographic and visual (including photographic) sources.

The commonly held view of the tropical forest as untouched wilderness ignores the skills and knowledge of those who live and work there. Most nontimber products underwent varying degrees of transformation before export to avoid spoilage in a humid environment. A production-centered view reveals a wide range of local techniques like harvesting, logging, tapping, refining, filtering, roasting, purifying, smoking, felling, and chipping. Attention to the technological landscape also foregrounds the importance of knowing tropical forest-lore and having environmental expertise, given that the biological makeup of trees and plants influenced the specific forms of extraction, refining, and transport.

Tropical forests are fragmented spaces, with tree species dispersed throughout vast territories, which makes wild foraging difficult and poses logistical complexities. This explains why, from early times, forest products underwent initial processing to reduce bulkiness and weight, thereby facilitating in situ storage and savings in shipping costs. Dragging paths were created in forests, and rivers served as routes for trading houses, logging companies, and intermediaries to move commodities to ports. Forest products were loaded on carts and boats and, when possible, workers took advantage of the buoyancy of hardwoods. Forests' natural infrastructures enabled the extension of operations to less accessible areas and, in recent times, were complemented by modern infrastructures. In the late nineteenth century, for example, light animal-drawn trains and trams expanded. Later, tracks, motor tractors, skidders, light railways, and bulldozers arrived in the jungle. The expansion of industrial infrastructures was constrained by environmental conditions and often depended on local labor and knowledge.

Commodification not only transformed global consumption and industrialization but impacted forest societies and environments. In broad terms, until the nineteenth century, tropical forests were not subject to major external pressures for commodity production, thus allowing relative indigenous autonomy.²³ During the industrial age, however, as demand for tropical products increased, forest societies increasingly relied on market-oriented production as a source of income—and therefore on foreign markets. The commodification of tropical forest products was neither seamless nor uncontested. Rural societies did not always participate peacefully in—and indeed frequently resisted—this process, including the expansion of key infrastructures such as railways. Their resistance is not difficult to understand, given that the growing appetite for tropical forest products changed the socioeconomic basis of indigenous societies. In short, commodification often resulted in cultural dislocation and dispossession.²⁴

Changes in land ownership and forced exploitation of rural communities often led to violent conflicts and everyday forms of resistance. Intermediary contractors used coercion to guarantee the supply of forest commodities. For instance, recruiters used a debt-peonage system to lure forest workers. Commonplace in rubber production in Brazil and elsewhere, "enganche" involved advancing money and sometimes tools to workers, who subsequently entered into a kind of debt bondage relationship with their employers.²⁵ Exploitation and violence were so harsh that the production of jungle commodities generated major frontier conflicts such as the Caste War of Yucatán. Other tropical forests likewise became areas of intense imperial rivalry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, unleashing military struggles over access to natural resources, such as the Camphor Wars in Taiwan and the Acre War between Bolivia and Brazil.

The history of commodity production also provides opportunities for rethinking the environmental embeddedness of techniques and skills.²⁶ Addressing the interplay between the environmental and technical conditions of forest production significantly disrupts conventional binaries between the human and nonhuman. Such an approach promises to integrate nonhuman actors like plants, animals, and rivers into the history of globalizing jungle commodities.²⁷ In line with recent enviro-tech historiography, the study of jungle commodities sheds light on how human/nonhuman relationships both shape and are shaped by technological transformations.²⁸ A production history of jungle commodities also encourages us to rethink long-standing but unproven assumptions about the environmental damage wreaked by local extraction techniques like tapping and removing bark and commonplace slash-and-burn forms of cultivation in forest zones.

Finally, a history of production in tropical forests highlights the cultural memory and material heritage of jungle exploitation beyond traditional primary research material. Notably, this includes oral stories of commodity booms and busts, environmental transformations (degradation, vulnerability), and recent collective experiences of abandoned or repurposed built environments like infrastructure and plantation complexes. These stories, along with research on the aesthetics of technological modernity in the jungle—in particular its visual representation—could ultimately promote a new imagining of the tropical forest as an anthropogenic landscape.

Historical Examples

We may lack an integrated understanding of the jungle, the industry, and the laboratory. Still, we do have examples that are evocative. Historical cases show—when studied comparatively—how tropical forests and Western industries became deeply interconnected through the extraction, processing, transport, and manufacturing of resinous agents, fibers, seeds, oils, yams, and barks. A first illustrative example, initially studied by Daniel Headrick, is gutta-percha.²⁹ In the 1840s, gutta-percha became a vital commodity once the emerging communication industry used it for insulating submarine telegraphic wires and, later, telephone wires. The transoceanic expansion of such networks meant that companies had to protect undersea cables from salt water. To avoid corrosion, cables were insulated with gutta-percha obtained from the tropical forests of Southeast Asia. In the forests of Malaysia, Borneo, and Sumatra, locals felled gutta-percha trees and cut the bark into rings to extract its natural plastic. After extraction, most gutta-percha was taken to entrepôt cities in the area, such as Singapore, where it underwent additional processing. Overharvesting soon depleted the forests where gutta-percha grew, thus limiting supply and causing severe environmental damage, as John Tully has shown.³⁰ Cheaper botanical and chemical alternatives for electrical insulators were eventually found in the interwar years. However, gutta-percha was still used for producing golf balls and dental fillings. Historical studies on gutta-percha are strong, but few consider the techniques, skills, and labor involved in its extraction, processing, and manufacturing, leading to a lack of general understanding of how complex and entangled this global history of production is.³¹ Moreover, most works only discuss in passing the intense scientific research that gutta-percha and other natural polymers have unleashed in corporate laboratories since the late nineteenth century.

Ian Inkster recently uncovered the technological connectivity that camphor's rise to global prominence created in the 1870s.³² This material from the highland forests of Taiwan became vital for British and American chemical industries, producing the first commercial plastic (celluloid), along with pharmaceuticals and other chemicals. The forest zone of colonial Taiwan, inhabited by indigenous communities, became strategic for camphor companies until World War I, when artificial substitutes were discovered, particularly the synthesis of Bakelite. Scholarship, including Robert Friedel's earlier work, has shown that the advantages of celluloid were its malleability, uniformity, and colorability. 33 The new process allowed celluliod to imitate more expensive materials such as ivory and ebony and be used in a wide range of products, from combs to photographic film. Historians have done some excellent work on scientific research, innovation, and the manufacturing of plastics in U.S. and British chemical industries.³⁴ Here too, few have explored the other end of the commodity chain. Consequently, we still do not know much about how the wood of the camphor tree was processed in forest camps, the expertise required, or the production and distribution logistics in the industry—and what we do know about labor largely comes from writings of the time. Many workers were indigenous people, who gathered camphor manually from selected trees and roasted the wood chips in stoves before condensing them using steam—tasks that required hard labor and intensive logging to obtain firewood.

Chicle is another tropical commodity that merits further research, certainly from the perspective of the history of technology, science, and environment. Between the 1870s and 1940s, chewing gum—made of the natural gum obtained from Manilkara zapota trees native to the Yucatán Peninsula—became a mass-consumption product in the United States and later in Europe. This story is well-documented by Jennifer Mathews and Michael Redclift, who tackle the rise of natural chicle, focusing on culture and consumption rather than production technologies.³⁵ Still, the historiography leaves many crucial gaps on the long quest for an artificial substitute and the connected technological histories of the chicle producers in Yucatecan jungles and the manufacturing companies in the United States and Canada.

This is quite an omission since their histories—and respective knowledge bases—are entangled. Two distinct sets of experts were at the heart of the early chewing gum industry.³⁶ On the one hand, large chewing gum companies such as Wrigley and the American Chicle Company relied on scientists to add colorants, flavors, preservatives, and sweeteners to the chicle base and convince consumers that chicle was nonharmful. On the other hand, chewing gum companies and intermediary traders relied on the labor and skills of forest refiners (chicleros), indigenous people and seasonal workers who tapped and deftly processed this latex deep in the forest. Forest communities combined tapping chicle with other forms of subsistence, such as the swidden cultivation of corn and the production of logwood dyes and mahogany for regional and international markets. Chewing gum companies responded to the growing demand for chicle by setting up in-house research laboratories (staffed by professional chemists and experts in patent management) and hiring growing numbers of local and migrant laborers to bring to Central American chicle camps. These companies also devised logistical improvements, particularly air transport of chicle from the jungles of the Petén and Quintana Roo in the 1930s. The ever-increasing demand for chewing gum in World War II further incentivized U.S. producers, such as the American Chicle Company, to research artificial substitutes because the finicky chicle trees resisted producers' efforts to grow them on plantations. Here too, Western companies sought replacements that could overcome their dependence on the jungle and therefore circumvent the knowledge base of forest workers. Like other natural elastomers, chicle was replaced with cheaper and more consistent synthetic polymers, such as polyvinyl acetate, in the 1950s.

The wild rubber industry, which rose and fell between the 1860s and World War I, epitomizes the commodification of jungle products. According to conventional history, its boom in the Amazonia and the forests of equatorial Africa was set in motion by Charles Goodyear's invention of the vulcanization process in 1844, and driven by Johns Dunlop's invention of the pneumatic tire in 1888.³⁷ This industry, however, was based on the expert work of rubber tappers (seringueiros), who performed traditional extraction and processing techniques in the forest under extreme conditions and varying degrees of servitude.³⁸ Many contemporaries in Europe and North America, however, considering jungle production inefficient and anachronistic, found it inconceivable that the vast international rubber production market depended on a handful of workers whom they found difficult to control. Although tappers did not necessarily control the exchange or trade of wild rubber, which was generally left in the hands of intermediaries, its extraction and processing rested on their skills and relative autonomy in an inaccessible environment. Wild rubber thus remained a high-priced commodity prone to market instability due to regular shortages. Experts and analysts attempted to rationalize and standardize forest production by improving harvesting methods, developing infrastructure, treating tropical diseases, and eliminating independent collectors and intermediaries. Their efforts met with little success.³⁹ Production—and Western dependence on the jungle forest—changed entirely in the early 1900s, when botanical experts and tire manufacturers shifted to cheaper and labor-intensive rubber plantations.

The shift is widely reflected in the scholarship. Scholarship on rubber has increasingly focused on the history of commercial plantations in Asia and Africa along with the environmental constraints in Latin America.⁴⁰ Likewise, the invention of synthetic rubber has generated interest for some time.⁴¹ By contrast, few works have addressed tapping, coagulating, drying, smoking, and grading techniques, smaller rubber estates in rainforests, and scientific research on rubber chemistry. Indeed, wild rubber production requires more global studies that investigate techno-scientific interdependencies and transfers before the plantation era. One remarkable exception is historical anthropologist Stephen Nugent, who studies in depth the rubber production techniques in the Amazon and the links between local rubber tappers and industries in Europe and North America.⁴²

We see similar research opportunities in the scholarship of other jungle commodities. Modern pharmaceuticals were manufactured from tropical forest substances naturally found in bark, leaves, and roots. For example, Gabriela Soto Laveaga describes how locals in Mexican jungles harvested the barbasco yam that enabled the first steroid contraceptives in the 1940s.⁴³ An earlier example was cinchona bark, for centuries the most effective drug for the prophylaxis and treatment of malaria. Before reliable synthetic antimalarials were invented in the 1940s, the only source of quinine was the alkaloids obtained from the bark of wild cinchona trees native to Andean forests and the Amazonian slopes of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. The use of Andean cinchona in Europe and Asia dates from the sixteenth century, although indigenous people knew its healing properties in pre-Hispanic times. By the nineteenth century, this bark was exploited almost to exhaustion in a context of increasing imperial aspirations and European expansion into the tropical world. As an active ingredient, quinine was not isolated until 1820 in Paris—improving its extraction and precisely identifying the alkaloid content of each piece of bark. Thus began the expansion of the wild chinchona bark industry. Soon, the first factories manufacturing purified quinine extracts were set up in Europe, initiating a growing level of industrial production.

Stefanie Gänger's and Matthew Crawford's recent fascinating books on cinchona bark from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century are a welcome development.⁴⁴ Still, a technological and environmental history of its production in the Andes and its connection with international dynamics after the 1820s is needed. Quinine production grew exponentially, with Andean nations dominating the supply of cinchona bark until the 1890s. This commodity's extraction and primary treatment relied on the knowledge of bark collectors, who knew how and when to strip the bark, then dry and crush it. Their skill was vital, as alkaloid levels differed according to the species, age, and location of the tree, and drilling and drying techniques were challenging in a humid environment. Rising demand led to overexploitation and, in some cases, aggressive harvesting techniques that practically wiped out cinchona trees from Andean South America. The supply crisis explains the gradual shift to cultivation in the Andes and the Amazon and, more importantly, Asia, with Dutch plantations in Indonesia dominating production by the end of the nineteenth century.⁴⁵ Experimentation enabled the hybridization of cinchona trees that were not only better adapted to Asian conditions but whose bark had a higher level of alkaloids. From then on, the cinchona industry declined in the Andes, despite a brief resurgence during World War II, as Nicolás Cuvi shows.⁴⁶

From a long-term perspective, the development of botanical and artificial substitutes closed the production cycles of many nonwood tropical forest products. Even when tropical forest products coexisted with substitutes for some time, Western industries' reliance on their production in the wild largely petered out. Some tropical woods and fibers, such as eucalyptus, teak, and rattan, are still considered valuable—even experiencing growing demand—but are now mostly produced on commercial plantations. Some natural plastics (chicle, camphor, and gutta-percha) lost their importance. Others, like natural rubber, have remained vital for global industries. Even today, the natural rubber cultivated in plantations has not been entirely replaced by its artificial counterparts, showing that chemical substitutes cannot always imitate nature exactly. While the planting of tropical trees aimed to achieve "forest-led industrialization" of the tropical world, it has often been unsuccessful due to environmental and knowledge constraints.⁴⁷

Conclusion

The production of commodities has connected jungles, industries, and laboratories since the early nineteenth century, yet much of this entangled history remains hidden. Our knowledge of the role of local techniques, knowledge transfer, and environmental conditions in shaping global commodity cycles is still rudimentary. The challenge is to consider tropical forest frontiers as part and parcel of the wider global rise in chemical, pharmaceutical, and consumer industries. An interconnected history of production can help us rethink traditional narratives of industrialization and highlight the techno-scientific and ecological entanglements between tropical forests in the Global South and industries and laboratories in the Global North.

The history of commodity production is equally a stark reminder of the agency of subaltern actors and how their knowledge served the needs of global manufacturing industries. Thanks to forest workers' labor and expert knowledge, chewing gum, the contraceptive pill, and rubber tires became global commodities. These workers' extraction and primary processing activities were essential, as was their ability to select the right plants, navigate forests, grade quality, and move production. Long overdue attention to the entangled global history of tropical forest products will reveal the deep historical roots of pervasive bioprospecting and the appropriation of knowledge from the tropical world.