In 1972, Walter Rodney wrote, ‘It is common knowledge that Liberia was an American colony in everything but name’.Footnote ¹ As evidence, Rodney cited the ballooning profits of the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company. Between 1940 and 1965, the Ohio-based tyre manufacturer exported 160 million dollars’ worth of rubber from Liberia, while the Liberian government received only 8 million dollars in revenue. Firestone controlled huge swathes of Liberian land, following the 1926 concession agreement that granted the company a 99-year lease over one million acres. The Firestone Natural Rubber Company still owns the world's largest rubber plantation in Liberia.Footnote ² Significantly, the company also secured its future by tying the 1926 agreement to a 5 million dollar government loan, ensuring the US government would step in to protect its interests. Thus, the interests of the Liberian government became inextricably linked to Firestone's fortunes.

Gregg Mitman traces the origins and development of this American ‘corporate colonialism’ in Empire of Rubber: Firestone's Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia. As the author explains, the book is a slice of American corporate history viewed from the perspective of Liberia, rather than a history of Liberia itself. Mitman, like other researchers, has been unable to access the Firestone archive, but he has carefully surveyed a wide range of relevant archival material from the US, Britain, and Liberia, as well as all the relevant secondary literature.Footnote ³ Interview material enhances the account of life on the plantations, as does judicious use of photographs. More narrative history than academic intervention, the book puts forward a strong case against Firestone, highlighting the economic, legal, and cultural impact of its massive land grab.

The subtitle deliberately evokes the ‘Scramble for Africa’ that saw vast territories of the continent's land divided up into colonies by European powers, only Liberia was famously unlike other colonies. The inception of the modern Liberian state can be traced to a small number of Black American settlers, despatched to Sierra Leone in 1820 by the American Colonisation Society. The next year, representatives of the society purchased around 140 acres of land further south. The settlement was inspired by hopes of Black self-determination in Africa, but also served as a means for white segregationists to exile free and manumitted Black people from the US. In 1847, the settlers declared their independence from the American Colonisation Society and established Liberia as an African republic. Independence left Liberia with few resources and competition between European empires constantly threatened its existence. Neighbouring British and French colonial governments demanded that Liberia ‘develop’ its territories or be forced to cede them. How then would an independent Liberia survive? Liberian independence also made it a crucible of hopes and schemes for Black liberation. It was the focus of the activism of numerous Caribbean and African-American supporters through the 19^th and 20^th centuries. A key strand of Empire of Rubber explores the conflicting views of sociologist and African-American intellectual leader W. E. B. Du Bois and Black nationalist activist Marcus Garvey on Liberia's development. Du Bois, initially at least, supported the Firestone concession.Footnote ⁴ He thought the capital injection it would bring, along with the promised 35,000 jobs, would transform the nation's fortunes and assure its independence as a Black-led state. Garvey offered an alternative model. His proposed Black Star Line would provide capital to service Liberia's national debt through selling shares in a Black-owned shipping line.Footnote ⁵ Part of the tragedy in Mitman's narrative is these glimpses of roads not taken, which might have distributed control of Liberia's resources beyond a wealthy elite (52–8). Through the text, Mitman returns to Du Bois’ changing position on Firestone in Liberia as it tracked with his growing disillusionment with capitalism itself.

In 1926, Du Bois and the Liberian government put their faith in Firestone's offer to ‘develop’ the nation through a massive complex of rubber plantations. Firestone would export its ‘company town’ model from Akron, Ohio to Harbel, Liberia. Mitman identifies the genesis of this model in Firestone's union-busting in the early days of Firestone's operations in the US. Firestone was able to forestall the influence of the International Workers of the World (IWW) trade union by offering worker housing, even while slashing pay (18). As the corporation expanded, domestically and internationally, it circumvented workers’ legal rights in favour of company-controlled ‘benefits’.

These benefits did not extend to a lack of racial discrimination. Mitman shows how Firestone (both the company and Harvey Firestone, its president) were steeped in racism (19). Firestone workplaces remained segregated in the US and segregationist policies only hardened in Liberia, where white employees were in the overwhelming minority.Footnote ⁶ It seems surprising that a company which wholeheartedly embraced Jim Crow would land on Liberia as a primary location for production. Firestone did first scout other locations, such as the Philippines, for his dream of a rubber plantation which could service the US economy's growing demand. But European colonisers across the world sought to both exclude American competition and keep control over labour (28). It was Solomon Porter Hood, the African-American US consul general to Liberia, who first brought Firestone's attention to some abandoned rubber plantations on the outskirts of Monrovia. With Du Bois’ endorsement, this small American foothold in the West African coast appeared ideal for Firestone's ambitious plans.

Firestone's role was self-consciously compared to that of European colonisers. Hailed as a ‘missionary’ in the American press, the corporation proclaimed itself to be ‘redeeming’ Africans through agricultural labour (77). The Bassa and Grebo people who lost their land to the massive concessions had a different view. The place name Queezahn — meaning ‘white people took us from there’ — memorialises not only the loss of land, but also a permanent displacement of people (86). Diverse and fecund forests, cultivated for food and raw materials, were levelled for plantations.

Mitman draws a great deal of evocative evidence from a scientific survey of Liberia, led by Harvard staff in 1926–7. The expedition, which was financially and materially supported by Firestone, conducted a medical and biological survey and mapped the interior regions.Footnote ⁷ As the expedition progressed, the American staff mocked people who refused to have their picture taken, or their blood drawn, or their tumours excised. They could not comprehend that folk in rural Liberia were keenly aware of the links between scientific experimentation, plantation management, and the loss of their land (91).

Indigenous knowledge of the environment was exploited, then erased, from the scientific record, alongside land claims (90). In the place of ‘generational expertise’, American ‘experts’ were sent to organise industrial education tailored to produce effective plantation labourers. By now, Du Bois was disillusioned with white-led educational initiatives targeted at Black people. But US philanthropists, educational advisors, and agricultural consultants had landed on a system of ‘industrial education’ which just happened to dovetail neatly with Firestone's aims (140–5). Du Bois’ frustration with Firestone was expressed in a damning critique, ‘Liberia, the League, and the United States’ published in Foreign Affairs in 1933 (151–2). In it, while condemning the plantation scheme he once supported, he still set out his belief in an educated elite and disparaged African methods of organising labour.Footnote ⁸ Faith in a technocratic solution over local methods still prevailed.

An alternative model to plantation monoculture was offered by the partnership between Bai Tamia Moore (head of Liberia's Bureau of Agriculture) and American senior agricultural specialist Frank Pinder in the 1950s. Moore and Pinder encouraged the development of cooperatives, diversification of agriculture, and the use of farming practices suited to the environment (223–30). Their successes threatened Firestone's position. But again, they were supported by the US academic establishment, in this case a team from Northwestern University criticised Liberia's indigenous farmers and promoted the Firestone monoculture as the ‘model for development’ (230). Academia and academics have a great deal to answer for, and to learn from, this history of complicity.

The epilogue emphasises the role of women in reclaiming land, but gender is little discussed beforehand (244). The main actors in the Empire of Rubber are men, though local women leaders such as Chief Suah Koko or women plantation workers do briefly appear. Given the central role that women play in international discourses of ‘development’ and in agricultural work in West Africa, what role did gender play in this history of exploitation? How did the undemocratic ‘welfare capitalism’ of the plantation impact on women's rights?

Another question that emerges is why rubber production became so coercive and so violent in so many places. Demand for rubber increased rapidly in the early twentieth century, at the same time as a racialised and intensive system of production was introduced. Much as with sugar and cotton in the nineteenth century, vast profits drove rapid expansion and very little of the wealth found its way to the workers. Other approaches to plantation studies take a more anthropological focus, which can illuminate the relationship between rubber cultivation, colonialism, and violence, such as Ann Laura Stoler's Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870–1979.Footnote ⁹ In a different approach, Giacomo Macola's Una storia violenta: Potere e conflitti nel bacino del Congo sets rubber production in a broader historical context of violence and exploitation.Footnote ¹⁰

Empire of Rubber adds an important case study to the broader critique of ‘development’. Its readable narrative, like Greg Grandin's Fordlandia, exposes the outsized influence multinational corporations exercised, and continue to wield.Footnote ¹¹ Mitman concludes that the ‘plantations had been immensely beneficial to the Firestone empire’, but that the ‘benefits accrued to Liberia are far less clear’ (238). This unsatisfying concluding statement belies Mitman's careful marshalling of evidence that clearly shows the harms perpetrated in the name of ‘development’. Having seen all this unfold up close, W. E. B. Du Bois ended his life utterly disenchanted with the capitalist system that abetted it. ‘Either capital belongs to all or power is denied to all’, he and Shirley Graham Du Bois warned at the first All-African Peoples’ convention in Accra (235). Empire of Rubber makes a similarly bold point.