Eduardo Sguiglia's novel Fordlandia, the source of these two quotations, is a fictionalized account of the rubber plantation established by Henry Ford in the jungles of Brazil. Ford's errand into the Amazon wilderness served a dual purpose. He sought to establish a source of raw rubber for automobile tires other than British-dominated Malaya, while inculcating “backward” peoples with the work ethic and the faith in material progress that characterized Fordism. Ford regulated life in his self-named company town with a giant clock, whose piercing whistle imposed time discipline over the indigenous workforce, just as he hoped that social dancing and proper hygiene would uplift the natives. But Fordlandia was not the success its sponsor envisioned. A clash between Anglo managers and the diverse workforce of Indians and Afro-Caribbean migrants assembled by the company, as well as a rubber-tree blight, doomed Ford's adventure into the twentieth-century global frontier.

Historians of American foreign relations are better positioned than ever before to offer cutting-edge interpretations of the issues raised by Fordlandia in ways that can match the brilliance of Sguiglia's literary treatment. Successive calls for methodological innovation have prompted scholars to borrow from political science, cultural studies, and other disciplines. They have studied nonstate actors and marginalized groups and introduced race, culture, ideology, postmodernism, literary criticism, and gender into their analyses. But these new approaches to US foreign relations have only begun to provide comparative perspective on the American experience in the world and challenge the exceptionalist assumptions that have long been associated with the field. Recent scholarship on borderlands and frontiers, however, offers historians valuable insight into the nature of cultural encounters and shifting cultural identities, the fringes of states’ political authority, and the integration of the human and natural resources of peripheral areas into larger systems of economic exchange.