Duas Cervejas

James C. Scott

  • BuyFordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin
    Metropolitan, 416 pp, $27.50, June 2009, ISBN 978 0 8050 8236 4

It was clear that Henry Ford’s audacious attempt to establish a vast rubber plantation in Amazonia had failed long before the first shipment of latex from Singapore arrived in Brazil in 1951. When the plantation, which was larger than the state of New Jersey, was set up in 1928, the Washington Post’s headline had boasted that it was expected to provide the latex for two million cars a year streaming off the assembly line in Dearborn, Michigan. Not only did it fail to achieve that, it couldn’t even supply Brazil’s modest needs. Why did the richest man in the world fail so abjectly to duplicate his North American successes in Brazil?

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