Pflanzentransfer unter Gewaltbedingungen – Eine kurze Geschichte des Kautschuks

For more than a century and a half rubber plants have played a prominent role on the growing global market. This article focuses on the history of three rubber containing plants and the change of ecological, economic and social conditions caused by transferring them. The export of seeds from the Brasilian rain forest to Southeast Asia smoothed the way to domestication of the rubber tree and the establishment of plantations. The transfer converted the plant into a subject of systematical breeding and thus alienated it from its wild Brasilian relatives. In the United States dependency on British controlled plantations fostered the search for alternative rubber sources. In war times rubber turned into a resource of strategic significance and transport routes became hard-fought territory. This increased time pressure on the search for domestic rubber plants in the U.S. as well as in Germany. Haste however, and a violent regime of production control entailed the failure of the attempts to develop an out-of-the-way plant into a reliable source of raw material.