British Rubber Companies in East Africa Before the First World War

Abstract

Until the Second World War, at least, tropical Africa constituted harsh and difficult terrain for Western capitalism — a region where financial loss, erosion of the capital base and ignominious failure were as likely for the expatriate or metropolitan firm as profitability or growth of turnover. This simple fact has been obscured in recent years both by the practice of business history which, in Africa as elsewhere, tends to concentrate upon the relative handful of enterprises which prospered and survived, and by dependency/underdevelopment theory which stresses Western capital's penetration into, and its re-ordering of, non-capitalist societies. That many European firms failed to make an effective entry, however, deserves to be reiterated, and the reasons for lack of success need closer investigation if acceptable conclusions are to be drawn about the character and consequences of European business activity in Africa. Such are the aims of the present article, which evaluates the brief history of twenty-two British companies set up to engage in rubber production in East Africa shortly before the First World War. It seeks to answer two questions — how is their presence to be explained and, more importantly, what factors frustrated their ambitions ? — and hopes to illustrate comparative international aspects of British corporate activity and investment. The failure of British rubber-planting initiatives in East Africa, it will be argued, was the obverse, and indeed a direct consequence, of successful British rubbercultivation in South and South-East Asia.