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Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City. Greg Grandin, New York: Picador, 2009. xiv +416 pp., maps, photos, notes, index. Paper $16.00. (ISBN: 978-08050-8236-4).
If there is time to read only one book on Brazil this Fall, this is the book. Historian Grandin presents a superbly researched analysis of the ill-fated attempt by Henry Ford to establish a rubber plantation site, together with a town, Fordlandia, on die Tapajos river, some 100 miles upstream from Santarem in central Amazonia. This experiment in commercial colonization turned out to be a total disaster. From the initiation of the project in 1927, when Ford decided that it was time to break European control over access to Asian rubber, the seeds of which had been illegally removed from the Amazon basin earlier, environmental and social conditions proved to be overwhelming. Ford's idea was to recreate a Dearborn-like replica of production, a plantation system of rubber trees lined in rows on areas cleanly deforested. What he and his advisors forgot, and did not inquire of the local mateiros, was that the natural scattered distribution of rubber trees in the forest offered protection from the predatory bugs, mites, caterpillars, ants, and especially leave-blight fungus, that were delighted to see die closed-canopy plantations as closely-spaced banquet sites. Utopian ideals met Amazonian reality in scenarios that allow the reader to wonder how things could have gone so badly wrong for so long.
Of course Ford, the brilliant industrialist who had calculated that it took 7,882 separate tasks to build...