Historia Elastica

From scattered references in government documents and contemporary academic articles, this paper constructs a rough history of the wide and largely paralegal trade in Ficus elastica, or India-rubber, across the north-eastern frontier of British India. In order to avail of the resources beyond the revenue line, nearly every rubber firm operative in the area struck numerous informal arrangements with the chiefs of the local communities through a network of Marwari shops, which became public only after legal complications arose during community skirmishes or transfer of mahals.While evidences survive to suggest that these firms often enjoyed tacit support from the government, the firms’ indirect recognition of the territorial rights of these communities was also a constant source of irritation to the British administration, which deeply mourned the loss of revenue duties on the unregistered products. Confused discussions and half-hearted legal actions followed, entailing a peculiar legal regime and culture of extraction. The empirical details of this history may be helpful in rethinking the general nature of joint-stock capitalism in a ‘savage’ frontier.