Henry Ford Tried To Build A Detroit In The Amazon
Fordlandia’s wild tale of industry, ambition and reality
Henry Ford was an unrivaled genius. His vision created the modern automobile industry and much of the modern manufacturing process. Ford was one of the richest and most imaginative people of his generation. But not everything he did was a success. Ford’s visions for the future were often ambitious and sometimes his ambitions did not match up with the harshness of reality.
Henry Ford’s grand ideas careened headfirst into inconvenient truths in the jungles of Brazil during the 1920s and 1930s. One of the biggest hindrances to his business at the time was the lack of affordable rubber. The British Empire had a firm grip over nearly the entirety of the world’s rubber supply. Rubber plantations in Africa and Southeast Asia were directly owned or controlled by British interests. Instead of dealing with the British trade monopoly, Ford wanted to create his own rubber producing colony that he could buy from directly and cut costs.
This idea led him to secure a massive concession of land in the jungle from the Brazilian government. Ford negotiated a parcel of land that measured 2.5 million acres in exchange for 9% of any profits he turned during the venture. The economic activity in the parcel and related to the parcel were…
