Histories of ‘Red Rubber’ Revisited: Roger Casement’s Critique of Empire

Abstract

The Irish literary critic Declan Kiberd has commented how the generation of Irish women and men who rebelled in 1916 against British authority in Ireland were more concerned with the future than they were with the past. Understanding the intellectual complexity of their radical critique is still work in progress. In the case of Roger Casement, it has taken a century to pass for a dialogue on human rights law and crimes against humanity to develop and prosper in order for his own achievement to be recognised. Casement’s name will be forever linked with the exposé of desperate atrocities committed in the three decades before the outbreak of the first world war. The insatiable commercial demand for extractive rubber by the industrial world to nourish the next generation of transport and electrification led to an atrocity that defies
measurement in terms of human suffering and environmental damage. This trans-Atlantic tragedy has in many ways defined the modern emergence of both sub-Saharan Africa and the Amazon. Retrieving the history of the rubber resource wars remains a challenge for those who contest the self-justifying narratives of western progress. At the picentre of Casement’s investigations was his nuanced critique of empire rooted in his scrutiny of racial and genderbased violence. His methods of investigation and his deeper critique of the imperial order is as relevant today – in this faltering age of globalization – as it was a century ago, when Casement faced his accusers and was executed for his challenge to imperial systems on a scaffold in central London.

Keywords: Roger Casement, rubber, human rights, Putumayo.