Rubber Wars: Rubber at the End of Empire in Colonial Malaya, c. 1945–57

This article argues the Malayan rubber industry’s fortunes both reflected and coloured the relationship between Britain and the USA during the early Cold War era. British Malaya had developed a world leading rubber industry within a few short decades. The importance of rubber to burgeoning manufacturing and transport industries however – especially in the United States – meant that the commodity became caught up in the geopolitics of a changing world order. During the 1920s and 1930s, Britain had dictated international market rules due to their largely unrivalled position but the Second World War had changed the global balance of power. From 1945, Cold War rivalries imposed on where Malayan producers could sell rubber and saw the outbreak of new violence centred on the symbolic site of British rule: the rubber plantation. This new geopolitical reality combined with the advent of synthetic markets meant that Britain could no longer be complacent. They moved towards a more scientific and professional industry and, to developing more competitive methods and products. The case of the Malayan rubber industry provides a lens into the entanglement of Cold War politics and the waning of imperial power, embodied in very real terms on the local rubber estates.