In 1915 an Indigenous leader named Juan Carlos Tasorentsi and several thousand followers laid waste to rubber estates across a large swathe of Peru’s Selva Central rainforest. Conservative journalists quickly defaulted to the civilization-versus-barbarism trope, but other writers were not so sure. For the previous at least twenty years, they noted, rubber barons had moved deep into the Peruvian Amazon. At first, many native groups had been willing to work in exchange for tools, cloth, and other useful things. They stopped producing their own food and added it to the bill. Later, as the supply of “willing” debt peons dried up, estate owners turned to slavery. Often, they outsourced this trade to local chieftains, whose raids (correrías) terrorized native people over a vast hinterland.
And then disaster struck. After 1910 plantation rubber from Southeast Asia began pouring onto the world market. The price of Amazonian jebe plummeted and...
