Empire of Rubber: Firestone's Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia

In the early 1920s, Americans owned eighty percent of the world's automobiles and consumed seventy-five percent of the world's rubber. But only one percent of the world's rubber grew under the US 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 ex...