ABSTRACT
A corollary of the argument that the Amazonian rubber industry is best characterized as a boom is that to the degree that a boom emerges as an out-of-control period of growth, its culmination – with all the baggage of explosive resolution – is a form of failure. The failure of the Amazon rubber industry to innovate positively in response to an exterior and fiercely competitive plantation model may lie elsewhere than in the intentions and/or poor planning of the barons and the tappers, but severally represented in social organizational and entrepreneurial terms. In a colonial history portrayed as a series of booms and busts, rubber nominally fits, barring the durability of a distinctive rural, oligarchical structure that sees regional retention of power in the national realm even after the 'bust' period. Even after Brazil-the-sleeping-giant was partially awakened by the modernization jolt of the post-World War II period, Amazonia remained by most reckonings a backwater.
