Henry Ford is famous for the invention of the production line, for creating a motoring revolution that transformed America, and for saying “history is bunk” and “you can have any colour as long as it’s black”. What he’s definitely not known for is paying millions of dollars to establish a rubber plantation in the Amazon rainforest, which – and this is the good part – would be a model of smalltown American values in the midst of the malaria, vampire bats, deadly snakes and indigenous peoples. Greg Grandin’s engaging book redresses this balance by telling the story of Fordlandia, possibly Henry Ford’s greatest folly.

Fordlandia is a wonderful primer on Henry Ford – a deeply contradictory and confusing person if ever there was one. On the one hand, he made mass-production work, he subjected his workers to ‘speed-ups’ and all kinds of brutalisation and invasions of privacy; on the other, he hankered for the kind of small-town, self-sufficient, all-American existence that his own creation, the Ford Model-T, was doing so much to change forever. This instinct for social engineering was apparent in many projects of Ford’s, especially rural ones such as logging camps and lumber mills – so when the company decided to establish its own rubber plantation in Brazil, it was inevitable that it would be presented not just as a means of securing a supply of latex for Ford’s use, but as a means of bringing the American way of life to the Amazon basin.

Grandin also does a good job of explaining why the plantation idea was doomed on simple economic grounds: the transplantation of rubber trees to South East Asia had cost Brazil its latex monopoly some years before – in Asia, the conditions were right for the trees to grow, and none of their natural predators were present, so plantations could be established. In Brazil, leaf blight and numerous insect pests meant that any attempt to plant rubber trees in serried rows was almost bound to fail. Undeterred by this possibility (he was strongly prejudiced against experts), Ford gave the go-ahead to obtain a vast land concession from the Brazilian government, and assembled an expedition to establish the plantation. From that point on, there are echoes of Heart of Darkness, as the ideology and optimism of the venture gave way to innumerable problems. The Ford Motor Company was determined to proceed as if there was no difference between the Amazon and the backwoods of Michigan, and at one stage, when things finally looked like living up to Ford’s vision (with the settlement having a hospital, mess hall, bungalows for the workers and their families and even the beginnings of a plantation), their heavy-handed approach to the workers resulted in rioting that set everything back by years.

Fordlandia never produced a meaningful commercial crop of latex. While it did contribute techniques that made rubber plantations possible elsewhere in Central and South America, it was, on any terms by which its success could be judged, a massively costly failure, an illustration of the limits of commercial imperialism in the face of the mighty Amazon – and Henry Ford died without ever having visited the settlement that bore his name. Greg Grandin tells this whole story with insight, compassion and an eye for the contradictions inherent in everything Ford did, both Ford the man and Ford the company.

Fordlandia is everything that a popular history book should be – and in a thought-provoking epilogue, Grandin lays out the realities of the Amazon’s current plight, in the context of which, Ford’s interventions look like small beer indeed. Despite its flawed conception, despite its arrogance, reading about the fate of the Amazon today is almost enough to make you wish Ford had succeeded in establishing a community at heart of the world’s greatest rainforest – because it couldn’t possibly be worse than what’s happening there now.

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