Managing Empire: The Rubber Economy of the Bay of Bengal, 1927-1945

"Managing Empire: The Rubber Economy of the Bay of Bengal, 1927-1945," follows the reproduction of the British Empire through the rubber plantation complex of India, Ceylon, and Malaya during the Great Depression and Second World War. The Depression shook the foundations of the empire in the Indian Ocean. Collapsing commodity prices threatened millions of pounds of British investment in plantations, stressing an empire financially exhausted by war. With agricultural commodities in freefall, the empire saw mass unemployment, the collapse of inter-Asian commercial and credit markets, the potential transfer of British plantation assets to American investors, and waves of anti-colonial mobilization and communal violence. Drawing on official, business, and press archives in the UK, India, Malaysia, and Singapore, I show how planters, businessmen, statesmen, and colonial officials built a coalition to preserve European command, subject to inter- and intra-class conflict, anti-colonial mobilizations, and militant labour movements. Engaging with the historiography of empire, capitalism, business, and labour in South and Southeast Asia, I argue that the plantation complex was crucial to globalization and fragmentation across empires in the Bay of Bengal.I argue that the rubber economy, including its commodity, capital, and labour markets, was a laboratory for new frameworks of British imperial power, exercised through international economic governance aimed at preserving European command over Asian land, markets, and labour. These experiments in economic diplomacy depended on a professional class of statesmen, civil servants, company directors, and professional managers stretching across colonies, metropoles, and even empires. The rubber economy – its workers, managers, traders, and regulators, both European and Asian – was a pivot point of the empire, depending on negotiations in boardrooms, courts, the press, and on estates. Significant contradictions posed by the drive to preserve European command over Asian economic life resulted in waves of proto nationalization across the Bay of Bengal, emanating from colonial states and militant associational movements of labour unions and anti-colonial nationalists. This interwar experiment of managerial interventions in inter-colonial economic life temporarily protected British capital in the Bay of Bengal while incubating the era of decolonization and partition after the Second World War.

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