The Color Line and the Assembly Line – Managing Race in the Ford Empire: American Crossroads

"If you think you know Fordism, think again. Elizabeth Esch offers a compelling new history of the style of mass production, social discipline, and consumerism that Henry Ford introduced not just to his Michigan auto plants but to the world. But where most have seen in Fordism a rationalized, impersonal, even potentially progressive American economic system, Esch reveals a transnational regime of white supremacy that sorted workers into racial categories for varying degrees of supervision, coercion, exploitation, and oppression. Tracing the history of Fordism from Detroit, Michigan, to KwaFord, South Africa, to Fordlandia, Brazil, to Hitler's Berlin, Esch shows how racism is not an atavistic remnant destined to disappear with the progress of capitalist rationality, but an integral part of that capitalist rationality. The Color Line and the Assembly Line is history of capitalism at its best."--Andrew Zimmerman, author of Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South