The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire
Featuring a strange adventurer and a revolution in the production of rubber, Jackson’s tale takes readers to the hypnotic heart of the Amazon in the 1870s. There they meet Englishman Henry Wickham (1846–1928) toiling at the first of a series of obsessive failures as a planter. However, Wickham’s name redounds through botanical and industrial history as the man who absconded from Brazil with seeds of Hevea brasiliensis, the rubber tree. Explaining that those seeds became the genetic root of the British Empire’s domination of world rubber production in the early twentieth century, Jackson’s comparison of that result with its origin in one eccentric’s activity in the back-of-beyond yields a fascinating tale. In a finely crafted narrative, Jackson shows how Wickham embarked on his adult life hoping to become an explorer-writer but abandoned his travels in Amazonia for the lure of wild rubber. Domesticating rubber was on the agenda of Kew Gardens in London, and as Jackson links Wickham to Kew, his humanizing of the hard-to-like Wickham results in a winning storytelling performance. --Gilbert Taylor