Thread by @LSELibrary

Almost everyone following our Twitter feed probably knows we hold the incredible Charles Booth archive.

It's his birthday today, so we thought we'd explore his connections to a city in Brazil... 🇧🇷 🧵

Booth is closely associated with Liverpool, the city of his birth and the place he started a business in partnership with his brother Alfred.

📸©️ Roger Marks: flic.kr/p/2iz48e3

He is also most immediately associated with London where he and his assistants documented the living and working conditions of the people for 17 years and produced those famous maps.

Booth's survey was entirely self funded. Where did he get the money to sustain it? Well...

Booth's family business was shipping and the Booth Steamship Co. operated a regular service from Liverpool to various ports in Northern Brazil from 1866 onwards. Among these was Manaus.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Manaus became a hugely prosperous city, located deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest which was the centre of the global rubber trade.

The extraction and export of rubber from trees found only in the Amazon Basin, became a hugely profitable industry. Most of this profit was gained at the expense of the indigenous people who were forced into labour to extract the commodity by the owners of the plantations.

The Booth Shipping Line appears not to have owned planations but instead transported the goods out from Brazil.

Britain was the leading colonial power at the time, driving much demand for rubber goods. It was also a Briton who would end the Amazon rubber boom.

Henry Wickham was able to export c.70k rubber seeds from Brazilian plantations by declaring they were only of academic interest. They were sent to Kew Gardens in 1876 in order to germinate seedlings that were sent to South and South-East Asia, capturing the market from Brazil.

Today there's a UN Convention in place, on Biological Diversity, which has made plants part of national heritage aiming in part to prevent the 'biopiracy' carried out by Wickham back when laws and regulations were looser.

Booth's life's work is so closely associated with London and the poverty of that ancient city; yet the money which helped to fund it partly emerged from the economic expansion —and exploitation— of the so-called New World and the newly prosperous city of Manaus.
#Twitterstorians