This research is dedicated to analyzing the agency of indigenous peoples from the Amazon region in the history of rubber research after its popularization at the French Royal Academy of Sciences during the second half of the 18th century. Before it was widely used in Europe, natural rubber was present in several ethnic groups in the Amazon region, such as the Omáguas (or Cambebas), Norak, Coussaris, Galibis, and Kali'na, in the form of objects for a wide variety of uses, many of which inspired rubber objects later produced on the European continent. The historiographic narrative unfolds as a cultural biography of a thing, describing and analyzing the tensions between indigenous and Western knowledge systems responsible for influencing the trajectory of the material in science. We argue that this early period in the history of rubber shows us the multiple forms of knowledge circulation between indigenous peoples of the region and European naturalists, as well as their implications for 18th century chemistry.

How does colonial industrialization create contact zones between different kinds of knowledge? This paper examines the case of leather tanning in late colonial South India, a field of artisan practice which became subject to intervention by chemists, trade agents, and other development advocates in the early twentieth century. Following the unprecedented demands for military-grade leather in the First World War, the provincial government of the Madras Presidency invested in the establishment of the Leather Trades Institute, a vocational school for leather chemistry which was nevertheless deeply cognizant of botanical methods of leather tanning. Moreover, the presidency began importing tannin-rich wattle bark to remedy shortfalls in locally grown avaram required for transforming skins and hides into leather. Wattle itself was indigenous to western Australia, transplanted to plantations in Natal, South Africa, and then shipped to South India through Bombay. These efforts to buttress leathermaking as an industry served to maintain vegetable tanned leather as an important export commodity for the Madras Presidency. Utilizing the archives of the colonial state—particularly the writings of Allan Guthrie, the principal of the Leather Trades Institute—my paper illustrates how leather tanning in interwar South India was an interface between modern chemistry and artisanal plant knowledge. The economic value of leathermaking knowledge made industrialization a unique site for the braiding of distinct knowledge traditions, with one never fully supplanting the other. Finally, I attend to how material circulations of the British Empire both enabled and limited how chemical knowledge could travel.

Although the so-called globalization of industrial R&D is often seen as a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century phenomenon, various U.S. multinational corporations had established an R&D presence in Asia or Oceania several decades earlier. To historicize R&D internationalization with a focus on transregional chemical exchanges and knowledge circulation within the Asia-Pacific, this paper compares Eastman Kodak’s strategies and practices with those of a selection of other large multinationals engaged in chemical research. I organize the analysis into three periods that represent different waves of U.S. foreign direct investment. First, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Kodak followed in the footsteps of General Electric by creating decentralized international R&D capabilities in the Asia Pacific. Kodak’s Australian research laboratory near Melbourne, however, would remain poorly integrated into the company’s transregional network of photochemical factories and R&D labs throughout the four following decades. Second, between the 1950s and early 1970s, West Germany and Switzerland became favorite destinations for U.S. chemical and electrical firms wanting to internationalize their research activities. RCA, however, also formed a research lab in Yokohama, for reasons that illustrate how and why the involvement of Japanese physical scientists and engineers into transregional corporate R&D programs predated the 1980s. Finally, in the late twentieth century, multiple U.S. chemical multinationals likewise created new R&D facilities in or near Yokohama. The paper’s analysis thus raises important questions about how the clustering of R&D investments in very specific places has affected the movement of proprietary chemical knowledge within and beyond the Asia-Pacific.