Jordan Goodman - The Devil and Mr. Casement

As I was reading this book, which examines the campaign to expose the horrific conditions of slaves working on rubber plantations in Peru during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, I saw an account of the way that workers in China were labouring in sweatshops to produce rather pathetic toys to sell as souvenirs at the 2012 Olympic games. As Socialist Worker commentated:

"Meanwhile toys of the Olympic mascots Wenlock and Mandeville are made in China by workers who are paid just 24p an hour. And Olympics cleaners sleep in prefab huts, with one shower for 75 people."

The conditions of those indigenous people forced to work extracting rubber from deep in the Peruvian rainforest, collecting it and bringing it to the Peruvian Amazon Company were far worse than 21st century Chinese sweatshops. But there are many similarities, not least in the attitudes of the employers who seem to think workers can be treated in horrific ways in order to turn a profit.

Despite its name the Peruvian Amazon Company was British registered, its directors were almost all upstanding members of the establishment. The company's main Peruvian entrepreneur Julio Arana is the Devil of the books' title. It was he who created an enormous "fiefdom" deep in the Amazon, far from civilisation that could extract vast quantities of rubber from the forest and generate enormous profits. In order to do this he need lots of labour. Workers who knew the forests inside out. In the early 20th century rubber was not yet grown on plantations and indigenous workers were needed who could find and tap the trees.

These workers were subject to the most horrifying violence and torture. British subjects from Barbados were employed to catch those who ran away and guns, whips and rape were all weapons to punish those who did try to escape or failed to bring in the required quantities of rubber. Jordan Goodman notes that in some cases the reward for bringing in rubber was little more than a cardboard belt, or a few trinkets. Young children were made to carry extraordinary amounts of goods on their backs. In London the men of the board of directors never questioned the source of their wealth.

But some did. Recent experience of Belgian rule in the Congo had alerted the British public to the fact that slavery and brutal colonial rule was very much still in existence. A number of newspapers and anti-slavery societies got hold of the story and pressure was brought to bear on the British government to examine allegations that a British company and subjects were involved in slavery. Roger Casement, one of the principle figures of the British diplomatic service involved in exposing events in the Congo was sent to Peru. His report was devastating and after a long, slow period of inaction, the British government eventually found the company guilty of slavery and torture.

Roger Casement, the hero of this tale is a strange character. While the book contains many fascinating individuals, heroic campaigners and principled fighters, Jordan Goodman has rightly concentrated on Casement. Casement came from a fairly well off Irish background. He easily fitted into the British diplomatic corp, but his travels around the world led him to increasingly identify with the oppressed colonial peoples. More and more he found himself linking their oppression with the experience of the Irish. Ultimately, Casement's principles meant that he became a great campaigner for Irish independence and, perhaps naively (he spent several years in Germany) during the First World War, he was part of trying to lead an uprising against British rule. Casement was stripped of his knighthood that he received for helping alert the world to events in the Congo, and executed.

Casement's transformation is fascinating. Goodman quotes him in 1907 arguing that "British rule was to be extended at all costs, because it was the best for everyone under the sun and those who opposed that extension out rightly to be 'smashed'."

Two years later he was writing from Brazil:

"It is not British honour appears to me so much as Congo men and women. British honour, so far as I am concerned, disappeared from our horizon in Ireland more than a century ago".

By the end of his trial in 1916, Casement could conclude about British rule in Ireland:

"If it be treason to fight against such an unnatural fate as this, then I am proud to be a rebel - and shall cling to my rebellion with the last drop of my blood. If there be no right of rebellion against a state of things that no savage tribe would endure without resistance, then I am sure that it is better for men to fight and die without right that to live in such a state of right as this."

The British State could never forgive Casement. But around the world, there were thousands, if not hundreds of thousands who owed their lives to his dogged fight for justice. Despite it's desire to be seen as the country of freedom, liberty and democracy, the British government dragged its heels in getting action over Peru. Casement and a handful of others helped mobilise thousands to pressure them for action and end slavery.

Today, the rotten system that exploits and oppresses people in the name of profit still remains. Indeed, worldwide, millions still labour in appalling conditions, for low pay, in sweatshops and even slavery. The struggles of individuals like Casement to highlight and end this remind us that it doesn't have to be like this. That someone like Casement could come to essential revolutionary conclusions, is an inspiration to all those struggling today against capitalism. This wonderful history deserves to be widely read and the heroes within celebrated.

Related Reviews

Jackson - The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Empire & the obsessions of Henry Wickham
Galeano - The Open Veins of Latin America
Mann - 1493: How Europe's Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth

Eduardo Galeano - The Open Veins of Latin America

Eduardo Galeano's classic history of Latin America, is not a cheerful book. Its subtitle, "five centuries of the pillage of a continent" sums up the general historical approach of the author. Written in the early 1970s, the book has never been more relevant, as many of the general themes that Galeano identifies occurring forty years ago have their similarities today. In Galeano's words, those who argue that Imperialism no longer has an interest in Latin America "forget that a legion of pirates, merchants, bankers, Marines, technocrats, Green Berets, ambassadors and captains of industry have, in a long black page of history, taken over the life and destiny of the most of the people's of the south."

Galeano begins his story with the pillage that began almost as soon as Christopher Columbus trod on the soil of the West Indies. The glitter of gold on the necklaces of the natives, triggered a gold lust that led to a tsunami of exploration and colonisation. With this, as Christopher Mann's recent book 1493 has demonstrated, came the diseases that destroyed millions of indigenous peoples. Columbus brought, on his second voyage, some of the plants that would further shape the destiny of the continent. Food for the slaves of future plantations, cash crops and fuel for export industries. While Galeano's book is a story of people, it is rooted very much in the exploitation of Latin America's natural resources, wood, silver, gold, oil and so on.

Early European capitalism drew strength and wealth for its nascent factories and machinery from the exploitation of Latin America. The blood and sweat of millions of slaves extracted yet further wealth from the continent, concentrating it in England, Spain and elsewhere. Before African slaves arrived in South America, Galeano points out that tens of thousands of indigenous people had been forced to work the silver mines of Potosi in Bolivia. Helping to enrich the kings and queens of Europe, and their merchants. The poverty, brutality and racism that helped fuel this slavery was to be repeated on a larger scale very soon.

The Latin American colonies never had a chance. Galeano demonstrates how, from their earliest days, they were places to enrich colonial capitals. The arrival of capitalism in its modern form, simply deepened and extended the project. In simple terms he points out, that while Brazil might export Volkswagen's to Africa, America and the rest of Latin America, the profits went to German capitalism. What Brazil represented to VW Was low wages and unorganised workers. Galeano doesn't make the mistake of arguing that the populations of the wider world benefited from this unequal relationship. He understands that the wealth of Latin America was used to enrich a tiny minority, a system and a few large companies. If anything, the under-development of Latin America meant the further shackling of workers in Europe and America to the capitalist system.

The book celebrates the resistance as well. Latin America has always been characterised by people refusing to accept their lot. From slave revolts to land occupations, revolutions and the mass strikes of modern times, Galeano documents the men and women who've fought back. Though he also points out how they were frequently victims of Colonial power. By the time of writing, Galeano was having to point out the way that America, which had eclipsed Spanish and British influence in the region, was using its Marines to protect its interests. Within a few years of this book being first published, Pinochet was, with the assistance of the CIA able to ensure that any attempts to democratise and change the economy in the interest of ordinary Latin Americans would not succeed.

The vast resources of Latin America continue to be of interest to the more powerful economies. As indicated earlier, one of these is the huge populations. At the time of US independence, Brazil had the same population as the whole of America. Yet it was locked into an unequal relationship with its British governors who ensured the surplus value from that population ended up in London banks. Like an unscrupulous loan-shark, European powers and North American banks loaned money to Latin America. Much of it never reached the countries it was intended for, nor built the factories and infrastructure it was supposed to. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Galeano points out, 40% of Brazil's foreign budget was swallowed by foreign debt.

"Railroads formed another decisive part of the cage of dependency: when monopoly capitalism was in flower, imperialist influence extended into the colonial economies' remote backyards. Most of the loans were for financing railroads to bring minerals and foodstuffs to export terminals. The tracks were laid not to connect internal areas one with another but to connect production centres with ports."

The infrastructure of Latin America was thus built in the image, and the interests of foreign capital. When the minerals ran out, so did the investors. Galeano's central theme then, is the way that capitalism under-developed Latin America. The consequences remain today:

"Latin America was born as a single territory in the imaginations and hopes of Simon Bolivar, Jose Artigas and Jose de San Martin, but was broken in advance by the basic deformations of the colonial system."

By the 1970s, Galeano points out, it was cheaper and faster for Brazil to ship goods to Mexico via American or European ports. Telegrams sent between Buenos Aires and Lima had to travel via New York. Latin America was stunted by its own history.

Since it was written, much has occurred in Latin America, little of it has changed this basic analysis. Mass movements and revolution have threatened the domination of the United States. This took place in Chile and Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. More recently it continues with the election of radical and leftist governments in the 1990s and 2000s. Some of those governments have failed the hopes of the mass movements that pushed them into parliament. Others continue to be a thorn in the side of Imperialism. What happens next, will as Galeano wrote in the end of the first edition of this book very much depend on "the hands of the dispossessed, the humiliated, the accursed."

He continues that:

"The Latin American cause is above all a social cause: the rebirth of Latin America must start with the overthrow of its masters, country by country. We are entering times of rebellion and change. There are those that believe that destiny rests on the knees of the gods; but the truth is that it confronts the conscience of man with a burning challenge."

Related Reviews

Galeano - Children of the Days

Mann - 1493: How Europe's Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth

Sader & Silverstein - Without Fear of Being Happy: Lula, the Workers Party and Brazil

Emir Sader & Ken Silverstein - Without Fear of Being Happy: Lula, the Workers Party and Brazil

The election of Lula as President of Brazil in 2003 was one of a series of left wing shocks that shook Latin America in the early to mid-2000s. Lula, the undisputed leader of the Brazilian Workers Party had long been seen as a far left opponent of the Brazilian ruling class.

This early book was published in the aftermath of Lula's failed attempt to win the Presidency in 1989. Lula tried again in 1994 and 1998 before winning in 2003. As such, the book is very dated. But its usefulness in part stems from its examination of the Lula's own early politics and the development of the Workers Party. For those of us who are engaging with Brazilian radical politics for the first time, this history is invaluable. Though I would suggest that people who would like a more up to date discussion of Lula, Brazil and the Workers Party look at more recent publications, such as Sue Branford and Bernardo Kucinski's book Lula and the Workers' Party in Brazil.

Lula took office declaring that ""my government will be for the excluded, the discriminated, the humiliated and the oppressed." While those hopes rapidly diminished, his statements reflect the radical origins of his party and his own politics. Lula comes from a poor, indigenious background, he rose to help found and lead the Workers Party as a reaction to the poverty and oppression that he saw. This short book examines well the recent history of Brazil, the time of the dictatorship that saw living standards crash and rights eroded. The growth of the Workers Party organically from a series of mass strikes and systematic campaiging are one of the reasons the party had such a root amongst the working class. The authors detail both the hard work that Workers Party activists engaged in, as well as the problems their approach took.

The Workers Party prided itself on breakign with that they saw as old forms of organsing the left. The authors are keen to describe part of the success of the party, as being due to Brazil lacking a large, leftist tradition. While in its early years, the Workers Party was absolutely clear that it was fighting for a transformation of Brazil towards a socialist economy, it lacked a clear theoretical understanding of how that would be achieved, and what it meant. Since much of its work concentrated on electoral success, this lead to major problems, particularly when Workers Party mayors found themselves clamping down on strikers in the cities they controlled.

The story of Lula's 1989 defeat makes up the final pages of this book. It's a fascinating story, because it shows the fear with which the ruling class of Brazil, and the United States had for a potential Lula victory. The Brazilian establishment closed ranks around its chosen candidate and Lula was defeated, in part by a series of dirty tricks. However, it was also clear that the Workers Party had failed to build deep enough roots in the wider non-working class population. In this regard, the sections on the Workers Party's early rural programme are particularly useful.

Sadly Lula's eventual victory in 2003 did not hold up to the ideals that are described in the short interview with him in the back of the book. This interview is probably worth digging out, for it shows the principles with which Lula fought the 1989 election. Early allegations of corruption and his pro-business policies that led to Lula clamping down on left wing deputies marred the first few months of his presidency. The mild reformism with which he governed has done little to benefit the ordinary people of Brazil, though it didn't stop him winning a second election and the Workers Party winning a third. The formation of the PSOL as a radical alternative to the Workers Party was one response, but that story is far ahead of the period covered by this early work.

Related Reviews

Robb - A Death in Brazil
Galeano - Open Veins of Latin America
Chappell - Beginning to End Hunger 
Sader - The New Mole

Peter Robb - A Death in Brazil

The opening chapter of Peter Robb's history, cum-travelogue about Brazil, begins with the attempted murder of the author. This is somewhat unusal for a book on history, though rather cleverly, despite starting with one of Brazil's perceived problems, the author actually manages to show us something rather different.

Nevertheless, violence is quite a big part of this book. That is because Brazil's history is fairly violent. Interspersed with his musings on Brazilian food, literature and bars, Robb takes us through the story of the slaves who cut the sugar cane and earned their masters fortunes. He talks about the decimation of the indigenious peoples, who were first assaulted by European disease, then sold into slavery and attacked when they escaped.

Some of this history is fairly unknown outside of Brazil. The story of Canudos is fascinating. This was a town, founded by a wandering, radical preacher who attracted thousands of people to him, not simply because of his sermons, but because the town was a beacon of openness and religious tolerance. The Brazilian military government saw it as a threat. Talking up the stories of lewd sexuality, and worrying about an alternative centre of power to their own capital, they sent four expeditions to destroy the town. There must have been something about living in Canudos that the people found better than the lives they could expect from the Brazilian landowners, because they fought back and defeated three military attacks. The fourth, used artillary and machine guns to massacre the inhabitants, men, women and children.

Robb's book is at its best when looking at more recent history. Though we might be accustomed to tales of violent attacks on street children or tourists in Rio, the real violence was the state sponsored war on the poor that dominated the 1980s and 1990s. Here, Robb draws out the complex chains of government and state corruption, the twisted networks of bribery that dominated government. The few individuals who grew fat stealing public money for themselves. While the majority of Brazilians coped with falling pay packets and enormous inflation.

Here Robb begins the story of the resistance. The mass strikes by car workers that brought cities to a halt and military governments to their knees. Its in this environment we first read about the future Workers' Party President, Lula. Lula's story of his rise from a poverty stricken, indigenious background to the leadership of Brazil is a near fairy tale. Robb keeps it very much in the context of a system prepared to destroy the poor in the interests of the rich, and politicans who collapse under the weight of their own corruption.

Lula's victory was an immense blow to the ruling class of Brazil, though Robb points out that this only happened in the context of the Workers Party blunting some of the edges of their most radical politics. Its for this reason that Lula's presidency no longer has the hope associated with it, though there have been improvements for some of the poorest.

Much has happened since this book was published. There are more stories to be told. A Death in Brazil is a good introduction to contemporary Brazilian politics, and Peter Robb tells a good story. When some of the corrupt politicians are brought to justice, or meet their ends, it felt much like the climax to a detective novel. So while this isn't the pure piece of history you might want, it is a damn good read and will probably fill some time on a beach in Rio.

Related Reviews


Mann - 1493: How Europe's Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth

Charles C. Mann - 1493: How Europe's Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth

The arrival of Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492 was a fairly minor event for a very small number of people.  The famous sea-captain's small band of men, encountered a fairly remote group of indigenous people. Elsewhere in the Americas, a vast plethora of different cultures and societies also flourished. Each organising in many, varied ways.

The impact of those that followed Columbus on the Americas was enormous. Vast numbers of the indigenous people died, mostly from the new diseases brought by sailors, explorers and colonists. Many villages were depopulated long before they saw a white man. Those that survived were often at risk from guns and slavery.

Charles C. Mann's book 1493 continues a story he began in an earlier work, 1491. There, he examined the pre-Columbian civilisations, discovering their complexity and extent, Here, Mann explores the impact of the arrival of Europeans, not just upon the people and ecology of the Americas, but on the world itself.

Coincidentally, some of what Mann explores here is also discussed in a book I reviewed recently, David Graeber's book Debt, which discusses in detail the impact of the trade in precious metals that began to leave the Americas in vast quantities soon after 1492. This is a great theme of Mann's book, and I think Mann captures far better the enormous wealth that was channelled out of the countries, but also the horror of the slavery and destruction that formed the basis for that wealth. Mann, like Graeber, discusses the way that the precious metals became part of the wider trade networks between Europe and China, how it facilitiated the great trading networks that already existed, turning them into enormous financial concerns.

However Mann doesn't limit himself to the economic consequences. He shows how our world has been transformed in the "post Colombian exchange". Large numbers of plants and crops arrived from the New World. Tobacco, maize, tomatoes, chilies and many others. These transformed both the Old World, but they also altered lives elsewhere. One of the most fascinating chapters discusses the social impact of the arrival of tobacco in China.

"As a child in the 1630s, the writer Wang Pu had never heard of tobacco. When he grew to adulthood, he later recalled, 'customs suddenly changed and all the people, even boys not four feet tall, were smoking.'"

Mann tells us how "late-waking aristocratic women, slept with their heads elevated on special blocks so that attendants could do their hair and makeup while they were unconscious - it shortened the time between waking and the first tobacco of the day."

Such attention to detail marks out Mann's book as a brilliantly readable history. His understanding of the wider social and economic relationships is fascinating, and his ability to tie in a wider ecological understanding adds a new dimension to a story that has often been discussed. In his explanation of the way that the earthworm was accidentaly re-introduced to parts of North America from where it had been driven extinct during the last ice-age, Mann links the slave trade, to the agriculture of the Americas and the practises of the ships crews that took part in the trade. His easy to follow explanation of the importance of earthworms to agriculture reflects a wider ability to explain difficult and complex ecological ideas.

Sadly much of the book is dominated by the horrific reality of the changes that arrived with Europeans in the Americas. The slave trade is one aspect of this, as is the slavery imposed on the indigenous people of South America. As capitalism develops and the New World becomes and increasingly important part of the world economy, Mann tells us of the horrors of the rubber plantations, conditions in Haitian slave plantations and the consequences of the introduction of Christianity to the continent. There is of course resistance, slave revolts and indigenous populations creating their own communities far from European towns. But much of the story centres of the cementing of a new way of organising and exploiting the natural world. It is this great transformation that is the real heart of Mann's story, one that has been central to shaping our modern world. Mann's book is a great introduction to this, that should be widely read.

Related Reviews

Cronon - Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
Graeber - Debt:  The First 5000 Years

Joe Jackson - The Thief at the End of the World, Rubber, Empire and the obsessions of Henry Wickham

Imagine a world without rubber. Cars would have to run on wooden tires. Engines would leak oil and petrol through badly fitting pipes. Electrical lights would rely on power that came through live wires. Undersea communications cables would be impossible without the insulation and contraception would be a lot more risky.

In the later part of the 19th and early 20th century, countries across the world started to realise that rubber, which came from a variety of different trees, dispersed across the rain forests of Southern America was a vital economic resource. As the decades progressed, the development of the automobile industry as well as the vehicles for the modern military machine made rubber a strategic resource worth millions of pounds a year.

The vast majority of the world's rubber came from Brazil. The trees didn't grow in plantations, they were isolated within the almost impenetrable forests. When seeds were removed from the trees, they tended to go rancid before they could be planted in other countries. This natural monopoly of rubber allowed an economic boom for some planters in South America. By the early parts of the 1900s, the city Manaus min Amazonia was a town to rival some of the great capitals of the world. Trams threaded through streets carved from the rain forests, the world's great singers and dancers risked malaria to perform in the giant Opera house and fortunes were being made.

It also was a major headache for the heads of industry in countries like Britain and America.

The British Empire had always believed that the natural world was something to be exploited in its own interests. Kew Gardens was redesigned as a place to examine and exploit the fauna of the world. Explorers and adventurers brought thousands of seedlings to the institute so that they could be examined for possible benefits to the Empire. Kew's first great success was getting Quinine out of South America, making the British conquest of India and Africa easier in the face of malaria.

Suddenly though, the Empire was reliant on another nation. Brazil was rapidly developing as a powerful nation in South America. Kew was the instrument which British capitalism needed to get it's own source of rubber. A variety of adventurers were sent on the long trek to South America to source seeds of the rubber tree. It's at this point that Henry Wickham enters the scene.

Up until he was called upon by the Empire, Wickham was a fairly insignificant figure. Born into a humble family that had had a rich past, he was determined to make his fortune. His life is marked out more by the failed enterprises he set up in countries from Amazonia to Australia than his successes. On the spot in South America, with knowledge of the rubber tree and its life cycle, he was able, in 1876 to get tens of thousands of rubber seeds back to Kew. These formed the basis of the rubber plantations in the Malay Peninsula which would eventually undermine the Brazilian source. Leading to the collapse of places like Manuas.

That's one side of the story. The tale of how capitalism and the British Empire could exploit and rob other nations and the natural world to fulfill its own interest. But this excellent biography has a second fascinating tale. It is the story of how individuals like Henry Wickham buy into the dream of Empire for personal glory, welath and international fame.

Wickham became famous long after his triumph in stealing the seeds. He was, like so many civil servants merely a tool, forgotten by the bureaucracy after he had ceased to be useful. His advice on the planting of the rubber trees was ignored. His letters to the people at the head of Kew Gardens go from triumph to pleading as he is forgotten. When he receives a letter asking him to secure some seeds his personality changes overnight. From failed rubber plantation owner to servant of the Empire in a matter of moments. He doesn't realise that Kew has many others trying to do the same - that he is merely a name on a list. He now becomes prepared to sacrifice everything for the Empire.

Having dragged his extended family to South America he leaves those still alive to suffer and escapes to London as soon as he can. Then with his reward in hand he drags his long suffering wife on another fruitless attempt to settle in Australia. Failure after failure follow him. His wife, unusually perhaps for those Victorian times, leaves him. A letter he writes personally to Queen Victoria asking for recognition for his services leads to him being publically deserted by the Empire he had risked everything for.

Henry Wickham's story is a fascinating one. He is one of those who gave everything in the service of the British Empire. He doesn't sacrifice everything, unlike the tribesmen who are tortured and killed in order to produce the rubber for the car industry. He doesn't loose his life as so many other did in the attempt to rebuild the world in the British image. But the image of him, tired and lonely at the end of his life, reliant on money from the American rubber industry speaks volumes for the way Empires exploit the world and their own people.

Related Reviews

Goodman - The Devil and Mr. Casement