I enjoy seeing foreigners/Americans reactions to this. Fordlandia looks like a playground to them, generally. Even a bit like fiction. They don't understand that it was real, with real people. Slavery isn't even mentioned once. Just "anti-semitism", to make what really happened just blur in the background of this story.
It's all fun and games, if your family wasn't part of this abuse.
Basically they mention "Amazon" as if it was a country on its own, it is actually in Brazil. It as if I had trillions and the US would let me explore their population and relax their own laws in order for me to invest on it. I bet Americans would feel mad about it. This happens frequently in Brazil, with big US(and also other companies) which can get away owing billions in unpaid taxes etc.
The US constantly throughout history has intervened in Brazil, let it be by politics or markets, thinking that they know better, lobbying corrupt politicians, or helping on a coup. It is kind of sad.
In the end the author mentions about in the end of WW2, they filling the city with military personnel. It is a very soulless article.
This was actually one of the more benign operations of rubber extraction. The previous efforts (not by Ford) in the Congo and in Peru were absolutely atrocious. The book The Dream of the Celt by Vargas Llosa does a good job of describing the horrors that went on in those countries.
As for US companies, they really have a long history of misdeeds in Central and South America. Guatemala had to endure 40 years of dictatorship because of bananas. That's just absurd.
> But one problem remained: Fordlandia was not producing any rubber. Jungle foliage continued to be cleared, but efforts to plant rubber trees yielded discouraging results. The few trees that took root were quickly beset by blight.
This is too bad. With vision clearer in hindsight, it appears Ford should have taken a more "lean" approach in testing his means of production, perhaps at a smaller scale requiring fewer personnel and ultimately a smaller investment.
I am no botanist, so I'm unsure if they had the means of fighting blight at that time, but the presence of it would have made me question the resulting scalability (if density of plantings had to be reduced).
However, the foible seems understandable, given Ford's ambition and track record of solving problems.
This honestly makes me think of Musk -- huge actions/claims/successes/failures. The parallels, while probably all imaginary, work out quite well in my head.
While many of Musk's endeavors have huge claims/visions behind them, it seems to me that the people behind them are actually good at testing them in a smaller scale and relatively quickly getting to a point where they are generating money, instead of staying up in the ivory tower.
Take the Boring Company which after a couple of prototypes landed actual contracts. Working momentum is powerful, even if it takes several times as long as people hope it would from the onset.
Who knows, maybe they'll even end up with a hyperloop in twenty years.
I'm surprised that I haven't seen this analogy more often. There are a lot of parallels between what Tesla is trying to do and what Ford did in its early days.
Just dropping this in for anyone that comes here afterward, but the author is a prize winning historian who's mentioned maybe a third of the way through the piece. His other work, such as Empires Workshop, are outstanding.
Thanks for posting, going to check this album out now. I've been a fan of his ever since listening to the soundtracks for "Sicario" and "Mandy". He was such a talent, gone way too soon.
There is an interesting history of "company towns" from the Robber Baron days that is similar in a lot of ways... also some of the early history of the Mormon church involves them setting up those kinds of settlements (read about the "Mormon Wars")
On a smaller scale, neighborhoods with neighborhood associations can enact restrictions that go beyond the laws of the localities that they reside within.
Charter cities are things that exist conceptually. Most famously Hong Kong and Singapore “special administrative zones”, but there are increasingly initiatives on the horizon trying to help fix institutions in countries lacking them around the globe: https://www.innovativegovernance.org/
It's all fun and games, if your family wasn't part of this abuse.
Basically they mention "Amazon" as if it was a country on its own, it is actually in Brazil. It as if I had trillions and the US would let me explore their population and relax their own laws in order for me to invest on it. I bet Americans would feel mad about it. This happens frequently in Brazil, with big US(and also other companies) which can get away owing billions in unpaid taxes etc.
The US constantly throughout history has intervened in Brazil, let it be by politics or markets, thinking that they know better, lobbying corrupt politicians, or helping on a coup. It is kind of sad.
In the end the author mentions about in the end of WW2, they filling the city with military personnel. It is a very soulless article.
All that for pure entertainment of some.