The demand for rubber increased all over the world with the advancement of mechanical civilization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rubber was needed to make electrical wire insulation, bicycle and car tires, weapons and heavy equipment. Lack of a few pieces of rubber would often hamper the production of heavy machinery.
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Before the discovery of synthetic rubber, most of the global demand was met from rubber trees in the Amazon jungle. The demand for rubber in Britain as a single superpower was much higher. Realizing the importance of rubber, Britain decided to impose its own control on rubber production.
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In 1876, the Royal Botanical Institute in London sent a British tourist named Henry Wickham to the Amazon for this purpose. After diving deep into the Amazon by boat, he reached the place where the best rubber trees grow.
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He used to collect rubber seeds in hand-woven baskets by showing greed for money to the locals. The baskets are wrapped with a few layers of banana leaves to avoid the shock of a long voyage at sea.
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Thus, with about 70,000 seeds, he left for Britain. He was able to avoid the attention of the local authorities by using a trading license under a different name and declaring the seeds academic samples.
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Only 2,700 seeds were found suitable for germination after reaching London after a long journey. This amount of seed was enough to start a planned plantation. The seedlings were later sent to various British colonies such as Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Batavia, Tropical Africa.
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The seedlings grow quite well in the Asian environment and tend to yield more rubber than the native trees of the Amazon. After coming to this rubber market, it gradually took over the rubber market of Amazon.
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The rubber-centric cities of the Amazon are slowly becoming dead cities as it is expensive to collect rubber from the jungle. Gradually Britain's exclusive control over the rubber market was established.
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In recognition of this achievement, Queen Victoria Henry Wickham was knighted. Joe Jackson later wrote a famous book, The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire.
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This is not the first case of bio piracy in the world. Earlier, silkworms were deliberately stolen from China. The British experimented in India by procuring tea trees from China to occupy China's exclusive tea market.
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If you read the book Rebellion in the Bounty or watch the movie, you will know that the British were taking bread and saplings from Polynesia for cultivation in the West Indies. See Less