The commerce in rubber: the first 250 years . by Austin Coates. pp. xv, 380, 50 pi., 3 maps (2 on endpapers). Singapore etc., Oxford University Press, 1987. (Commissioned by the Singapore International Chamber of Commerce Rubber Association.) £25.00.

Abstract

American reserve stock, on the eve of Pearl Harbour. Post-war technology, from synthetic to "crumb" rubber (a French invention) is explained, and the effects on the market, culminating along with other causes in the emergence of Singapore and the sponsors of Coates's researches as a, or the, major international market of the world. The last words in the book are on rubber exports from Southeast Asia after independence: although the industry in Ceylon seems to have gone to rack and ruin, rubber has flourished in Burma while other production was dwindling to a trickle.