On this episode, Chris and Claire speak with Greg Mitman, an award-winning environmental historian, filmmaker and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has written Empire of Rubber.
Mitman's book details how Liberia was transformed into America’s rubber empire. Mitman gives a riveting narrative into the ecology and disease, and racial politics and political maneuvering brought on by a corporate empire, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. Empire of Rubber is a crucial contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century colonialism and the rise of multinational corporations.