The ideas that humanity could be perfected through social engineering and that nature could be subjugated by the hand of man were fundamental to the modern project. In the first half of the twentieth century, perhaps no one exemplified that project as well as Henry Ford, he of the Five Dollar Day and the Sociological Department, the assembly line and the speed-up.
In this book Greg Grandin explores one of the most fascinating and least studied of Henry Ford’s initiatives: the production of rubber and men in the Amazon in the 1930s. He does it with depth, creativity, and erudition, using a rich body of sources from the periodical press, correspondence, technical reports, interviews, and documents of the governments of Brazil and the United States as well as the Ford Motor Company.
Fordlandia and its sequel, Belterra, rise from Grandin’s pages like Henry Ford’s failed dream of imposing his sense...
