ABSTRACT
There is no little perplexity in the fact that Amazonia is widely regarded as no less a natural space now than it was when first entered by Europeans in the early 16th century. Broad quantitative comparison of the wild and plantation versions of the industry also draws attention to land-labour aspects of the wild rubber boom, particularly the transfer of population from the Northeast to the Amazon the first Amazon-referenced instance of joining 'the people without land and the land without people'. Plantation rubber not only provided for manufacturers a 'carefully regulated flow of raw materials', it also – and immediately – did so at a price that was about a quarter of what wild rubber fetched. It is paradoxical that the Amazon industry should be portrayed as a boom and the plantation succession as just the normal progress of rationalization when the latter more clearly represents change by a different order of magnitude.
