The rubber industry, once one of the pillars of the economy, started with the theft of some seeds.

Over the space of a single generation, starting in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the rubber tree transformed the landscape, economy, geo-political standing and demographic composition of what was then Malaya.The upheaval and change was huge and the consequences of the “rubber revolution” can still be felt in modern Malaysia.

The introduction of the rubber tree was not some chance botanical experiment or an opportunistic planting by an enthusiastic amateur. Rather, it was part of a carefully planned and constructed botanical theft devised by powerful industrial interests in London and actively supported by the British government and its agencies. It was part of a national effort to secure control and dominance over a key natural resource.The plan worked beyond its architect’s wildest dreams.

Demand for rubber had grown enormously during the nineteenth century. Though the rubber industry had yet to feel the turbo-charged impact of the motor industry, by 1876 technical developments had already made it a raw material of central importance to industrial production and demand. In the 1820s, British inventors Thomas Hancock and Charles Macintosh (of the raincoat fame) had invented a machine that allowed a rubber solution to coat and waterproof cloth. This spawned a whole market for waterproof clothing and materials. In 1839, Charles Goodyear in the US found - by accident - that raw rubber when mixed with sulpher, was not affected by temperature change: vulcanized rubber was born and with it the age of the rubber tire, insulated wire, conveyor belts, rubber footwear and flooring. The only problem was that the raw material for this growing range of consumer products could only be found - expensively and unreliably - in the hot, wet jungles of South America and the Congo – inconveniently countries not under the control of the British.

And so a plot was hatched.Thomas Hancock, by now a wealthy and powerful rubber industry magnate, recognized that plantation agriculture offered the only means by which the industry could expect consistent and regular supplies of raw material – and by definition these plantations should be under the control of the British Crown. Hancock accordingly devised a scheme to acquire the seeds of Hevea Brasilinesis, a prolific and productive rubber tree native to Brazil. Under his patronage, a number of British agents attempted to smuggle seeds from under the noses of the protective Brazilians. But it was not until 1876 that Sir Henry Wickham, a British trader working in the lower Amazon region, secretly exported 70,000 Hevea Brasilinesis seeds to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in London. The results of this heist were planted and propagated in the specially constructed Tropical Herbarium hot houses (they can still be seen today at Kew Gardens in West London). In 1877, 22 seedlings from this progeny were sent to Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka), and from there eleven seedlings were sent to Henry Ridley, Singapore Botanical Garden’s recently appointed Director. He compared Hevea Brasilinesis with other rubber producing plants, recognized its superiority and promoted its cultivation. He also devised a method known as “bud grafting”, essentially a cloning technique allowing the rapid reproduction of genetically identical trees in limitless numbers. In the benign environment of Southeast Asia (huge plantations were to be established in the Dutch East Indies), the botanic basis for plantation agriculture of rubber was in place. In the same year, Ridley sent the first rubber trees to Malaya. These were planted in the grounds of Hugh Low, the British Resident of the embryonic colonial administration at Kuala Kangsar, Perak. From the nine trees planted by Low, one survives to this day – a solitary and rather bedraggled survivor of the original 70,000 seeds smuggled by Wickham out of Brazil over 120 years ago.

While Ridely had overcome the botanic hurdles to the plantation growth of rubber, successful industrial scale production necessitated huge in-puts of land, capital, expertise and labour. Once these were in place, rubber began to transform the landscape of Malaya, as virgin jungle was ruthlessly scrubbed to be replaced by serried rows of rubber trees, plantation roads, water sources, factories, accommodation blocks and the bungalows of the British managers. What had, until recently, been a countryside focused on the ageless rhythms of jungle and subsistence farming was now marching to the tune of international finance.

This became ever more true as the impact John Boyd Dunlop’s invention of the pneumatic tyre and the development of the motor industry rocketed demand. At the end of the nineteenth century, there were 2500 hectares of rubber plantation in Malaya. Ten years later, and in step with Henry Ford, there were half a million hectares. Southeast Asia (the Dutch East Indies was also in the throes of the same revolution) had become the world’s dominant source of a vital raw material, mostly from plantations (there was a parallel rise in smallholder production, which over time became a major aggregate contributor to supply).

The money for all this was raised in the London capital markets and Malaya became an integral component of the imperial capitalist system. In the space of a few very short years it was locked into the cycles of the world economy; the wartime boom years brought huge wealth, though Malaya was later to suffer badly during the depression of the 1930s. A far cry from the timeless subsistence economy so recently left behind.

The British looked to its Indian empire to provide the managerial know-how necessary to run these complex operations. Indian tea plantations frequently provided the rugged, independent – and often Scottish – managers that drove the revolution forward. It was also to India that the plantations looked for the cheap, resilient labour needed to perform the grinding work of pre-dawn rubber “tapping”; the Malays deciding this form of exploitative toil was not for them, and Chinese immigrant labourers drawn to tin mining. The British turned to the destitute landless labourers of the southern Indian Tamilnadu to provide the bulk of the work force. The arrival of large numbers of indentured Tamil workers had a long lasting impact on the demography of Malaysia. The Indian Tamil community currently comprises about 9% of the Malaysian population, or over 1.5 million people.

As Southeast Asia came to dominate the production of rubber, along with its tin and oil reserves it became a key component in the inter-war period’s geo-political struggle. To control raw material assets gave strategic advantage; to deny them to the enemy was almost as important. It was not surprising, therefore, that Malaya and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) were key targets for the Japanese as they sought to develop an Asian Economic Prosperity Zone, one of the main drivers behind Japanese militaristic expansion. It is often forgotten that the unprovoked attack on Kota Baru came some hours before Japanese fighters struck at Pearl Harbour.

Since the war, rubber has remained one of the pillars of the Malaysian economy, and it is still one of the world’s dominant producers – feeding a range of rubber and latex industries. But the rubber plantation sector has reduced considerably in overall size and relative national economic importance.

While new rubber types have hugely increased yield, and developments in tapping techniques have reduced the need for daily tapping, competition from cheaper neighbours, such as Indonesia, has undermined Malaysian competitiveness. The Malaysian plantation sector as a whole has taken a dramatic shift towards oil palm. One positive, however, has been a boom in the rubber wood furniture industry, which draws on the vast reserves of former plantation stock for this attractive semi-hardwood timber.

So, an audacious theft of seeds and the successful transference of an Amazonian tree to Southeast Asia when combined with industrial-scale propagation, growing demand, access to international finance, vast areas of virgin territory, managerial know-how and cheap indentured labour resulted in a “rubber revolution”, catapulting a sleepy, tropical nation into a significant niche-player on the international stage. Thomas Hancock, the architect of the original heist, could scarcely have believed that his little plan would have such a vast and sustained impact.