Join us and McNally Jackson Bookstore for a conversation with Gregg Mitman and Jacob Dlamini on racial capitalism, ecological injustice, and medical racism focused on the history of Firestone Tire and Rubber Company and its efforts to turn Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic, into America's rubber empire. Hosted by Yvonne Brooks.
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.
Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. An award-winning author and filmmaker, his recent films and books include The Land Beneath Our Feet and Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes. He lives near Madison, Wisconsin.
Jacob Dlamini is a historian of Africa, with an interest in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial African History. He is the author of The Terrorist Album: Apartheid's Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police (Harvard University Press, 2020); Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park (Ohio University Press, 2020); Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle (Oxford University Press, 2015; Jacana, 2014), and the memoir Native Nostalgia (Jacana, 2009).
