This is the script for my video posted on August 3, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
More shipping tonnage sails under Liberia's flag than any other country's, but only a third of Liberians even have electricity. And when USAID was dismantled in 2025, no country on earth lost more as a share of its national income. For two centuries Liberia has rented itself out: its land, its labor, and even its flag. So why hasn’t this led to long-term prosperity?
Modern Liberia begins with the American Colonization Society, or ACS, which was founded in 1816 as a coalition of people with very different goals.
There were abolitionists and clergymen who believed taking slaves back to Africa would prompt their masters to free them.
There were Black emigrationists like the early Liberian settler Lott Carey who sought self-determination and missionary opportunities.
And there were slaveholders who wanted free Black people removed to protect their own interests.
The unifying belief that allowed the ACS to exist though was that free Black people and white people could not coexist. Even abolitionists believed this at the time.
In 1821, US Navy Lt. Robert Stockton and ACS agent Eli Ayres obtained land at Cape Mesurado by literally putting a gun to the local king’s head.
The first settlers arrived the following year at a place they called Christopolis, renamed Monrovia in 1824 after US president James Monroe.
In 1847, Liberia formally declared its independence, and though it was recognized by Britain the following year, it took until 1862 for the US to do the same, because before the Civil War recognizing a Black republic would have required a Black diplomat to be present in Washington, DC, which was dominated by pro-slavery groups at the time.
The new country of Liberia was about 95% indigenous people for over a century, but the American settler minority dominated them. From 1878 to 1980, the country was ruled by the True Whig Party, and they achieved this through a separate interior administration governing indigenous areas, taxes on huts, and property and literacy requirements.
Notably, Liberia’s elite revolved around the Masonic Order, and non-members faced incredible obstacles to participating in the political system.
In 1926, President Charles D.B. King's government granted Firestone Tire and Rubber a 99-year lease on up to a million acres at six cents an acre, roughly 4% of Liberia's entire land area and a far larger share of its usable farmland. Tied to it was a separate 5m dollar loan that put an American financial adviser in charge of Liberia's books. Liberia took the deal partly because it needed the money to hold off British and French encroachment on its borders, which was the original job of the Liberian Frontier Force, the country’s first professional standing military. Firestone still operates in Liberia today though at a smaller scale.
But the Frontier Force did other work too. After losing the 1927 election, the politician Thomas Faulkner accused King and his administration of using it to conscript and ship indigenous laborers to Spanish cocoa plantations on Fernando Po, in modern Equatorial Guinea, under conditions hardly distinguishable from organized slave trade. A League of Nations commission agreed, and King resigned in 1930.
Liberia became strategically vital as a source of natural rubber to the Allies in WWII after Japan seized plantations in Southeast Asia. The US invested heavily, building what’s now Monrovia’s international airport and port. Liberia received lend-lease aid and declared war on the Axis powers in 1944.
The post-war period saw President William Tubman open Liberia to foreign concessions. Iron mining exploded. When Tubman took office, one major foreign firm operated in Liberia. By the early 1960s there were about 25, exports had more than doubled, and real output was growing fast.
Liberia conceded about 25% of the country in total to rubber, oil palm, and logging interests, and disputes over land are the unresolved core grievance underlying the country’s problems today.
In 1948, former US Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. built Liberia a flag of convenience registry through his firm, Stettinius Associates-Liberia. American-owned ships could then sail under a neutral foreign flag, which was useful in the Cold War, and in return 25% of the revenue went to the Liberian government and 10% went to Liberian social programs. The first ship was registered in 1949.
Liberia also hosted a Voice of America transmitter, a navigation station, a CIA communications relay, and the principal US diplomatic communications hub for Africa. The US was by far its closest partner.
But in 1979, things began to get bad. Proposed increases to the subsidized price of rice, the country’s staple food, triggered mass riots that killed dozens and weakened the government of President William Tolbert.
In 1980, Master Sergeant Samuel Doe and 17 indigenous enlisted troops killed Tolbert in the executive mansion. Ten days later, 13 senior officials were executed by firing squad on a public beach.
Ultimately, Doe took power, and a century of settler rule ended. Nonetheless, Doe continued to align with the US after briefly flirting with Libya. His regime started receiving more US aid than it ever had, because they were a reliable force against the Soviet Union. But Doe rigged the 1985 election, a former coconspirator launched a coup attempt against him from Sierra Leone that resulted in brutal ethnically-driven reprisals, and the country became embroiled in civil war from 1989 to 2003. This period alone could have a whole video of its own, but suffice it to say that an estimated 200 to 250 thousand people died and roughly half the population was displaced. In 2003, the UN authorized up to 15k peacekeepers to operate in the country. The UN mission ran until 2018, and though it ended the war, secured elections, and enabled reconstruction, it did not fix the underlying weakness created by Liberia’s government and political institutions, underlying grievances over land and economics, and indigenous ethnic strife. Not to mention ebola, which killed more people in Liberia than in any other country during the outbreak of 2014 to 2016.
And here's the thing about that ship registry. It was never run from Liberia. A private American company has administered it from the US since 1948, and in 1999 President Charles Taylor handed the contract to a firm headquartered in Virginia, where it still sits today. A flag of convenience exists so that foreign shipowners can avoid somebody else's taxes and labor rules. It was never going to build a country. Liberia nets only around thirty million dollars a year from the largest merchant fleet on earth. In one recent year that was under 3% of domestic revenue.
The real money is in the ground. Iron ore and gold are what's actually growing Liberia’s economy, and the fight that matters most right now is over a railway from the Nimba mountains to the coast. Whoever controls that line controls whether Liberian ore, and Guinean ore, ever reaches a ship to begin with.
The economy grew 5.1% in 2025 thanks to mining expansion, and in 2026 the IMF approved a new credit facility worth about 266m dollars. But the USAID programs that vanished in 2025 were worth almost 2.6% of Liberia's national income, making it the hardest hit of any country, and nobody yet knows what that will do to the country’s health system, which that money largely paid for.
Liberia was elected to the UN Security Council in 2025, its first seat in over sixty years, indicating real diplomatic rehabilitation. But it has also become a major transit point for drugs heading to Europe. And its porous borders with Guinea and Cote d’Ivoire threaten to import and export instability.
Liberia isn't poor because the world ignored it. The world has been extracting from Liberia for two hundred years, in rubber, in iron, and in registry fees. The country was built to be rented out. It is still looking for an arrangement where it gets to keep something.
Keep reading
- Why can’t Ghana afford its own democracy?
- How does South Africa’s history feed into its geopolitical dynamics?
- How does Malawi survive?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.