In 1927, Henry Ford, founder of the famous motor company and the richest man in the world, bought a 5,000 square-mile tract of land in the Brazilian Amazon. There he intended to build a rubber plantation. To the unkempt rainforest he would bring the principles of mass production: order, efficiency and productivity. He would harness the river itself in order to transplant capitalist civilisation to the dark heart of the jungle. But Ford wanted more than just rubber: he wanted to create in the Amazon an America in his own image: Fordlandia, full of neat houses, straight roads and restrained Puritanism. By 1945 it was abandoned in ruins.
Fordlandia is the powerful story of the battle between industrialised capitalism and the raw power of nature. It is the struggle too within Ford himself, who spent twenty years and several fortunes on his Amazonian dream, yet never set foot inside it. Superbly researched and grippingly told, Greg Grandin portrays a man suffering the grand delusion that the forces of capitalism, once released, might then be contained.
Selected as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2009 by the New York Times.
