When the Rubber Hits the Road

In a critique of West Africa’s Liberia in 1958, the Black American sociologist and commentator W.E.B. Du Bois commented that “a body of local private capitalists, even if they are Black, can never free Africa; they will simply sell it into new slavery to old masters overseas.” At the time, Liberia had the second-highest economic growth rate in the world. Liberia’s open-door policy had seen private foreign capital investment boom in the postwar period, as companies were granted land concessions and given tax breaks, incentivized by low wages and low regulation. Despite these impressive growth rates, as one U.S. ambassador to Liberia noted, “a handful of American-owned companies and about 1,000 Americans working in Liberia [made] more money in Liberia than all Liberians put together.”

Gregg Mitman’s is a fascinating and enlightening page turner that uncovers Liberia’s often overlooked importance in U.S. history. Without Liberia, founded by U.S. settlers in the 19th century, the Allies would not have been able to produce enough rubber to win World War II. In 1944, the Firestone Plantations Co. (now Firestone Liberia) was the largest employer in all of Liberia. And without the investment of Firestone, Liberia’s independence and its