With the ever growing demand for rubber latex, poor workers and indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest were forced by violence and under harsh labor conditions to collect rubber for international export. This had disastrous effects not only for the thousands of Amazonian natives who were violently displaced and forced to work, but also for the rubber-rich forests of the region, which had mostly disappeared by the beginning of the twentieth century.
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Further Readings:
- Stanfield, M. E. Red Rubber, Bleeding Trees: Violence, Slavery, and Empire in Northwest Amazonia, 1850-1933. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.
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1879