Gregg Mitman
Gregg Mitman
CURRENT PROJECTS
EMPIRE OF RUBBER
Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia
(The New Press, Fall 2021)
In 1926, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company gained access to one million acres of land in the West African nation of Liberia to establish a rubber plantation. The goal was to create a supply of this vital commodity for the United States free from British control. Firestone succeeded by bringing the forces of private capital, foreign diplomacy, and science and medicine to bear on the transformation of nature and a nation.
Empire of Rubber is a sweeping story of commerce and science, racial politics and political maneuvering, and ecology and disease. Revealing the symbiotic relations of business, science, and government in the making of a corporate empire, it is the story of a celebrated American company whose tentacles would reach into almost every part of Liberia, touching the land and lives of its people. In the making of a vast plantation, built off the land and labor of a sovereign Black republic, Firestone reaped enormous profits as the seeds were sown for a devastating civil war and, eventually, the worst Ebola outbreak in human history.
INTERROGATING THE PLANTATIONOCENE
Sawyer Seminar
This John E. Sawyer Seminar, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, draws together activists, anthropologists, artists, environmental scientists, geographers, historians, literary scholars, and sociologists, among others, to explore the plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale. Featuring a series of public talks, roundtables, workshops, films screenings, and exhibitions that run from February 2019 to April 2020, the seminar interrogates the past and present of plantations, the economic, ecological, and political transformations they wrought, and their significance to the making of human bodies, capitalism, and land over the course of four centuries.
CURRENT PROJECTS
THE WORLD THAT FIRESTONE BUILT
Capitalism, American Empire and the Forgotten Promise of Liberia
In 1926, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company gained access to one million acres of land in the West African nation of Liberia to establish a rubber plantation. The goal was to create a supply of this vital commodity for the United States free from British control. Firestone succeeded by bringing the forces of private capital, foreign diplomacy, and science and medicine to bear on the transformation of nature and a nation.
The World That Firestone Built is a sweeping story of commerce and science, racial politics and political maneuvering, and ecology and disease. Revealing the symbiotic relations of business, science, and government in the making of a corporate empire, it is the story of a celebrated American company whose tentacles would reach into almost every part of Liberia, touching the land and lives of its people. In the making of a vast plantation, built off the land and labor of a sovereign Black republic, Firestone reaped enormous profits as the seeds were sown for a devastating civil war and, eventually, the worst Ebola outbreak in human history.
INTERROGATING THE PLANTATIONOCENE
Sawyer Seminar
This John E. Sawyer Seminar, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, draws together activists, anthropologists, artists, environmental scientists, geographers, historians, literary scholars, and sociologists, among others, to explore the plantation as a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale. Featuring a series of public talks, roundtables, workshops, films screenings, and exhibitions that run from February 2019 to April 2020, the seminar interrogates the past and present of plantations, the economic, ecological, and political transformations they wrought, and their significance to the making of human bodies, capitalism, and land over the course of four centuries.