Category: Private Diplomacy

• The "Henry Ford" Peace Ship Plot

  This theory claimed that Henry Ford’s 1915 Peace Ship mission was not a naïve or idealistic antiwar intervention, but a covert effort to negotiate the foundations of a private industrial order above governments. The actual Peace Ship expedition was a real and widely publicized attempt by Ford to bring peace activists to Europe and encourage negotiations among neutral and belligerent powers. The conspiracy version transforms that mission into a private diplomacy project aimed at creating an “industrial empire” managed by business rather than states.