ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to look beyond the romantic, consensual rendering of boom-and-bust and consider the Amazonian rubber industry in terms of its place in the flow of commodities that intimately connected Amazonia to the industrial transformation of Europe and North America. A core concept employed in trying to illustrate the structures of integration of Amazonia into the world economy via the rubber industry is one closely linked with World Systems Theory (WST) – that is the notion of commodity chain. In anthropology the early WST proposals of Hopkins and Wallerstein were widely perceived as operating at too abstract a level to accommodate the extreme micro-level at which anthropological research generally operated. Mintz is closer in material and setting to what is proposed with respect to rubber, but that is only because Wolf's Europe and the People Without History has no single case study at its core and pursues a more textured version of the formal, and abstract, WST model.
