ABSTRACT
As the rubber industry was one of the greatest achievements of Western colonial enterprise; so it was one of the last. The political and economic conditions which made such a vast undertaking possible have passed away, and any future development on a similar scale in underdeveloped regions will almost certainly take place under circumstances that bear little resemblance to those in which the rubber industry came into being. Lampard of Harrisons and Crosfie1d was indeed prophetic
when he said in 1910 that the chances that existed in cultivated rubber were chances 'which exist certainly only once in a hundred years and very likely ... once in a thousand years';' The success of rubbergrowing in Malaya was the more remarkable in that there were very few precedents in that country for successful large-scale agricultural production. Indeed, the agricultural resources of Malaya, unlike those of Indonesia, were quite unproved until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and such early developments as had occurred were confined to the Straits Settlements.
