Hung Out to Dry
A woman on the island of Sumatra—part of present-day Indonesia—poses between sheets of rubber that are drying in the sun. The photo was published in a 1938 issue of National Geographic, when Sumatra was part of the Netherlands Indies.
8 Vintage Pictures Show the Global History of Rubber
The flexible substance that gave us tires and balloons is key to the story of colonialism.
Almost all of the world’s rubber comes from Southeast Asia, but that’s not because it’s the native habitat of rubber trees. The history of how the region came to be a global supplier is also the history of colonialism.
In the mid-1800s, Brazil was the world’s largest supplier of rubber, which the country harvested from trees in the Amazon forest. Unluckily for Brazilians, Europe’s empires didn’t like depending on a country they didn’t control for access to an important industrial resource. So Britain paid a man—Henry Alexander Wickham—to take 70,000 rubber tree seeds out of Brazil, and European countries established their own rubber plantations in their Southeast Asian colonies.
“A lot of these colonies weren’t really that valuable, especially to the Dutch
