Objective
Rubber connected rainforests, factories and research laboratories during the industrial age. This entangled history has been widely acknowledged, yet its complex material background remains poorly understood. WILDHIST is the first multi-scale and multi-sited historical analysis of the exploration, extraction, processing, transport and manufacturing of wild rubber in a long-term frame. The project hypothesis is that wild rubber industries in the tropical rainforests of Africa and Latin America were key sites in the broader dynamics of industrialisation and scientific research from the 1820s to the 1940s, forming an integral part of the expanding global networks of knowledge exchange. While most studies offer a fragmentary perspective, this unique project brings rainforests, industries and laboratories into a single analytical focus, thereby shedding light on their historical entanglement.
WILDHIST combines an analysis of contrasting non-plantation histories of rubber production in the Amazon, Congo Basin and so-called Maya Forest with broader histories of transnational interaction. The project rethinks and rewrites the global history of wild rubber by systematically and critically exploring a rich array of written, visual and oral sources located throughout the world. Its trans-local, interdisciplinary, comparative, digital and visual methodology will provide a truly comprehensive and nuanced historical account of how rubber was transformed into commodities and then final goods for local, regional or global markets. The project has three objectives: 1) Studying the actors, techniques, skills, knowledge and relations of production at rainforests’ rubber frontiers; 2) Reconstructing, mapping and analysing the transnational chains of rubber production, including networks of science and expertise; 3) Exploring the visual representation of rubber production throughout the world using tools of digital and spatial humanities.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
You need to log in or register to use this function
We are sorry... an unexpected error occurred during execution.
You need to be authenticated. Your session might have expired.
Thank you for your feedback. You will soon receive an email to confirm the submission. If you have selected to be notified about the reporting status, you will also be contacted when the reporting status will change.
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
28006 Madrid
Spain