ABSTRACT
Fordlandia is generally represented as an epic battle between the forces of rapidly maturing industrialization and implacable, tropical nature. Fordlandia was an attempt to make Amazonian rubber more suitable for manufacturing as well as to establish a model US community overseas. Fordlandia represents, in heroic, captain-of-industry mode, an attempt to do what many claimed should have been done by Amazonian entrepreneurs in the late 19th-century. Henry Ford's attempts to mount Amazonian rubber plantations are well-known and documented. Three substantial studies of Ford's experiment in the Amazon are available. These are Dean; Grandin's Fordlandia, an historical monograph; and the lesser-known Machado "Farquhar and Ford in Brazil: studies in business expansion and foreign policy". The tortured efforts of FoMoCo were focused on challenging Southeast Asian dominance, but by the time those efforts were abandoned the global rubber industry consisted of a receded sector of wild production, a sector of geographically restricted plantation production, and a sector of synthetic production.
