Download or read book Empire of Rubber written by Gregg Mitman and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious and shocking exposé of America’s hidden empire in Liberia, run by the storied Firestone corporation, and its long shadow In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation’s explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic. Empire of Rubber tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as Firestone transformed Liberia into America’s rubber empire. Historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman scoured remote archives to unearth a history of promises unfulfilled for the vast numbers of Liberians who toiled on rubber plantations built on taken land. Mitman reveals a history of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America—on African soil. As Firestone reaped fortunes, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few elites, fostering widespread inequalities that fed unrest, rebellions and, eventually, civil war. A riveting narrative of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering, Empire of Rubber uncovers the hidden story of a corporate empire whose tentacles reach into the present.
Download or read book Empire of Rubber written by Gregg Mitman and published by . This book was released on 2023-04-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A well-rendered and -documented tale of exploitation in the developing world" (Kirkus Reviews) with deep resonance in the present day In a book Paul Farmer called "a gem of a social history linking two countries stuck in uncomfortable embrace for well over a century," award-winning author and filmmaker Gregg Mitman tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as Firestone transformed Liberia into America's rubber empire. Scouring remote archives to unearth a story of promises unfulfilled for the vast numbers of Liberians who toiled on rubber plantations built on taken land, Mitman "peppers this history with a wealth of fascinating details and interesting characters" (Foreign Affairs), revealing a system of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America--on African soil. Called "a brilliant, compelling read" by Princeton scholar Rob Nixon, Empire of Rubber, now available in paperback, provides a riveting narrative of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering--the hidden story of a corporate empire whose tentacles reach into the present.
Download or read book Empire of Rubber written by Gregg Mitman and published by . This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious and shocking exposé of America's hidden empire in Liberia, run by the storied Firestone corporation, with impacts today In the early 1920s, Americans owned 85 percent of the world's automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world's rubber. But only one percent of the world's rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation's explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic. Empire of Rubber tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation., and environmental devastation, as Firestone transformed the republic of Liberia into America's rubber empire. Historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman scoured remote archives to unearth a history of promises unfulfilled for the vast numbers of Liberians who toiled on rubber plantations built on taken land. Mitman reveals a history of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America--on African soil. As Firestone reaped fortunes, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few elites, fostering widespread inequalities that fed unrest, rebellions and, eventually, civil war. A riveting narrative of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering, Empire of Rubber uncovers the hidden story of a corporate empire whose tentacles reach into the present.
Download or read book The Thief at the End of the World written by Joe Jackson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: JACKSON/THIEF AT THE END OF THE WOR
Download or read book A World History of Rubber written by Stephen L. Harp and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-12-21 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A World History of Rubber helps readers understand and gain new insights into the social and cultural contexts of global production and consumption, from the nineteenth century to today, through the fascinating story of one commodity. Divides the coverage into themes of race, migration, and labor; gender on plantations and in factories; demand and everyday consumption; World Wars and nationalism; and resistance and independence Highlights the interrelatedness of our world long before the age of globalization and the global social inequalities that persist today Discusses key concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including imperialism, industrialization, racism, and inequality, through the lens of rubber Provides an engaging and accessible narrative for all levels that is filled with archival research, illustrations, and maps
Download or read book Red Rubber Bleeding Trees written by Michael Edward Stanfield and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of Contents
Download or read book The Devil s Milk written by John Tully and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capital, as Marx once wrote, comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” He might well have been describing the long, grim history of rubber. From the early stages of primitive accumulation to the heights of the industrial revolution and beyond, rubber is one of a handful of commodities that has played a crucial role in shaping the modern world, and yet, as John Tully shows in this remarkable book, laboring people around the globe have every reason to regard it as “the devil’s milk.” All the advancements made possible by rubber—industrial machinery, telegraph technology, medical equipment, countless consumer goods—have occurred against a backdrop of seemingly endless exploitation, conquest, slavery, and war. But Tully is quick to remind us that the vast terrain of rubber production has always been a site of struggle, and that the oppressed who toil closest to “the devil’s milk” in all its forms have never accepted their immiseration without a fight. This book, the product of exhaustive scholarship carried out in many countries and several continents, is destined to become a classic.Tully tells the story of humanity’s long encounter with rubber in a kaleidoscopic narrative that regards little as outside its rangewithout losing sight of the commodity in question. With the skill of a master historian and the elegance of a novelist, he presents what amounts to a history of the modern world told through the multiple lives of rubber.
Download or read book Fordlandia written by Greg Grandin and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2010-04-27 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest. More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained. Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.
Download or read book Another America The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It written by James Ciment and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the history of Liberia, founded and settled by a small group of African Americans who left early 19th century America to free themselves from prejudice, but ended up persecuting the area's natives in a way that mirrored their own histories.
Download or read book The Michelin Men written by Herbert R. Lottman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2003-10-23 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the remarkable story of how two brothers - Edouard and Andre Michelin - turned a sleepy, family tyre firm in the heart of rural France into one of the most innovative and successful industrial empires in the world. Edouard, a landscape painter at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, displayed an engineering genius for tyre-making and product innovation, whilst Andre, trained as an engineer, displayed a creative genius for advertising and marketing. Together they kick-started the world motor industry and created a tourist industry around the motor car and their now legendary "Michelin Guides". The Michelin history, as described here by Herbert Lottman, reveals insights into the development of this remarkable business.
Download or read book How to Hide an Empire written by Daniel Immerwahr and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.
Download or read book Rubber and the Making of Vietnam written by Michitake Aso and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civilizing latex -- Cultivating science -- Managing disease -- Turning tropical -- Maintaining modernity -- Decolonizing plantations -- Militarizing rubber
Download or read book The Singapore Grip written by J.G. Farrell and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Singapore, 1939: life on the eve of World War II just isn't what it used to be for Walter Blackett, head of British Singapore's oldest and most powerful firm. No matter how forcefully the police break one strike, the natives go on strike somewhere else. His daughter keeps entangling herself with the most unsuitable beaus, while her intended match, the son of Blackett's partner, is an idealistic sympathizer with the League of Nations and a vegetarian. Business may be booming—what with the war in Europe, the Allies are desperate for rubber and helpless to resist Blackett's price-fixing and market manipulation—but something is wrong. No one suspects that the world of the British Empire, of fixed boundaries between classes and nations, is about to come to a terrible end. A love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city under siege and a dying way of life, The Singapore Grip completes the “Empire Trilogy” that began withTroubles and the Booker prize-winning Siege of Krishnapur.
Download or read book Where the Rubber Meets the Road The Bridgestone Firestone Conspiracy of Death Destruction a True Story written by Joseph Louis Lisoni and published by Mill City Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Open Message to Bridgestone Corporation Absent government or judicial intervention, if Bridgestone/Firestone Corporation does not abandon its use of substandard component parts and does not take immediate remedial measures in its tire manufacturing process, and does not terminate its unlawful business practices or cease its human rights violations at its rubber plantation in Liberia, Africa, the end result will be a multi-national corporation with manufacturing plants all over the world, populated by thousands of employees who make millions of tires, that nobody wants to buy! Lisoni & Lisoni February 1, 2019
Download or read book Planting Empire Cultivating Subjects written by Lynn Hollen Lees and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-21 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an innovative study of how British Colonial rule and society in Malayan towns and plantations transformed immigrants into British subjects.
Download or read book Green Gold written by Alan Macfarlane and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-11-30 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apart from water, tea is more widely consumed than any other food or drink. Tens of billions of cups are drunk every day. How and why has tea conquered the world? Tea was the first global product. It altered life-styles, religions, etiquette and aesthetics. It raised nations and shattered empires. Economies were changed out of all recognition. Diseases were thwarted by the magical drink and cities founded on it. The industrial revolution was fuelled by tea, sealing the fate of the modern world. Green Gold is a remarkable detective story of how an East Himalayan camellia bush became the world's favourite drink. Discover how the tea plant came to be transplanted onto every continent and relive the stories of the men and women whose lives were transformed out of all recognition through contact with the deceptively innocuous green leaf.
Download or read book Liberia written by John-Peter Pham and published by Reed Press(NY). This book was released on 2004 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this utterly depressing account of the west African nation's history and politics, scholar and diplomat Pham offers a cautionary tale regarding Western intervention in Africa. Colonized by free American blacks in the early 19th century, Liberia has long been beset by tensions, not only among its native populations but between natives and the descendants of its Western colonizers. But Pham is no knee-jerk blame-the-West critic- far from it. As he points out, Western investment, by Firestone and other rubber companies, "served as the principal catalyst for Liberia's infrastructure." The author does, however, acknowledge that the workers were paid little for the labor that enriched the rubber companies, and that tribal chiefs were given a cut for the toil of their villagers. Liberia's worst times have come in the past two decades, with rampant corruption and civil war. In Pham's eyes, nation-states have failed, in Liberia and elsewhere in Africa, for a variety of reasons: tribal and ethnic tensions and the end of the Cold War, which allowed weak states propped up by the superpowers to tumble. Pham argues that these states must take responsibility for their own reconstruction and reconstitution as democratic nations, without Western intervention, if they are ever to emerge from their current struggle"--from Publisher's Weekly, quoted on amazon.com.
