Overview
[Watercolor by Connor Craib, 2022]
I am a historian of modern Latin America with research and teaching interests in the intersections of space, politics, and everyday practice. My first book, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Duke U. Press, 2004), attempted to wrestle with questions of space, property and belonging through the history of cartography. The book examined the cartographic routines—exploring, mapping, and surveying—through which Mexican national sovereignty and a series of property regimes (from communal landholding, through to privatization and enclosure, to the creation of the post-revolutionary ejido, as well as riparian and water rights) were forged. A ‘social history of cartography,’ my book focused in particular on the points of contact, cooperation, and conflict between those living and working on particular lands (in this case, peasants in highland Veracruz) and those charged with translating legislative decrees in to social and juridical realities (in this case, land surveyors in highland Veracruz). The result was a kind of spatial history of liberalism, property and cartography. I expanded on my interest in putting social history and the history of cartography together in a number of subsequent essays, including a long piece on decolonization and cartography given as a keynote lecture at the Newberry Library and subsequently published as the introductory essay to Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation (U. of Chicago Press, 2017). A book of translations of a number of my essays on history and cartography is forthcoming in 2026 with UNAM's Instituto de Geografia.
Intersecting with my concerns with geography and space have been my long-standing interests in forms of collective political subjectivity that refuse the nation-state and open possibilities for different forms of egalitarian association. My second book. The Cry of the Renegade: Politics and Poetry in Interwar Chile [Oxford Univ. Press, 2016], took up such issues in the context of post-World War I Chile. The book’s starting point was an effort to understand the processes and events that led to the death, in September of 1920, of a young anarchist poet named José Domingo Gómez Rojas who had been arrested and detained, along with other workers and students, for alleged sedition and subversion. The book seeks to bring him to life through the lives and struggles of his comrades and friends. I emphasize a number of issues in the book: I pay close attention to university students and the radicalization and “disidentification” they experienced over the course of the 1910s as well as the close relationships they forged with working people. My focus on university students was intended to move beyond the persistent discourse of students as socially privileged and politically naive and therefore somehow less authentic political subjects, while at the same time moving to a period prior to the heavily-fetishized 1968. The book stresses the importance of anarchism in Chile in the first two decades of the 20th century and argues that the Left was, until the late 1920s, pluralist and capacious. I focus closely on anarchist organizers who spent most, if not all, of their lives in Santiago. They were sedentary, not peripatetic, radicals and this in part explains why they faced such severe persecution: they knew labor law, they knew who the industrialists and manufacturers and landlords were who did not abide by the laws or who attempted to break unions or strikes; they lived next door to the policemen who occasionally arrested them; and so forth. I stress this in part because in some ways I sought to move beyond the new orthodoxy of transnational history in order to look at the immediacy of place in relation to peoples’ politics without sacrificing the context of the international circulation of people and ideas. A Spanish translation, by Pablo Abufom, appeared in 2017 with Ediciones LOM (Santiago Subversivo 1920: Anarquistas, Universitarios, y la Muerte de Jose Domingo Gomez Rojas).
My most recent book is Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age (PM Press/Spectre, 2022). Imagine a capitalist paradise. An island utopia inspired by the fictions of Ayn Rand and the myth of Robinson Crusoe. Your own private archipelago. Sound far-fetched? It may not be. The past half-century is littered with remains of libertarian exit experiments. In Adventure Capitalism I sought to explore the long history of efforts to create private countries of the kind now envisioned by Silicon Valley tech-bros and investors (think of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, and Patri Friedman, among others). In the 1960s and 1970s, in particular, US- and Commonwealth-based libertarians explored ideas of exit and new country projects in the Caribbean, Central America and the Southwest Pacific. While their aspirations never came to fruition, they left a trail of turmoil in their wake, from the Minerva Reefs to the Bahamas to Vanuatu. Rather than focus solely on the agency and aspirations of the new country promoters, I examine closely the histories of the places in which they insinuated themselves and, based on five years of archival research, the manner in which these projects unfolded and imploded. The book is a global history traversed by an array of figures: Fidel Castro and the Koch brothers, American segregationists and Melanesian socialists, real estate speculators and colonial spies, soldiers of fortune and English lords, California engineers and Oceanian navigators, CIA operatives and CBS news executives, and Silicon Valley techno-utopians and Honduran coup leaders. It is a history of the recent past but, given the new iterations of privatized exit being pursued such as seasteads, free private cities, and space colonization, and the presence of the tech elite in the corridors of power, it may also be a history of our future. A Spanish translation (Países privados: Historias del sueño libertario) is forthcoming in 2025 with Editorial Prometeo.
I am currently working on a number of book projects, including a history of 20th century Chile and the lumpen-proletariat through the life and works of novelist Manuel Rojas and a social and cultural history of Madrid, Spain, in the 1970s and 1980s.
Publications
Books:
Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age (PM Press/Spectre, 2022). Spanish translation (Escapes Libertarios: Historias del del Sueño de Países Privados) forthcoming in 2025 with Editorial Prometeo (Buenos Aires, Argentina).
The Cry of the Renegade: Politics and poetry in interwar Chile (Oxford University Press, 2016) Published in translation as: Santiago Subversivo 1920: Anarquistas, universitarios y la muerte de José Domingo Gómez Rojas. Trans. by Pablo Abufom Silva, LOM Ediciones, Chile, 2017
Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Duke University Press, 2004). Published in translation as: México Cartográfico: Una historia de límites fijos y paisajes fugitivos. Trans. by Rossana Reyes, UNAM/Inst. de Geografía/CISAN, Mexico, 2014
Martirio, memoria, historia: Sobre los subversivos y la expulsión de Casimiro Barrios, 1920 (Santiago: Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Serie Signos de la Memoria, 2015)
Edited books:
No Gods No Masters No Peripheries: Global Anarchisms [co-edited with Barry Maxwell] (PM Press, 2015). German translation, edition assemblage, forthcoming.
Recent essays:
“Escape Therapy,” Los Angeles Review of Books (January 2023)
“Blast Off,” Anarchist Review of Books (Fall 2022)
“The Brief Life and Watery Death of a ‘70s Libertarian Micronation,” Slate (May 21, 2022)
“Crypto Bros are Trying to Buy an Island in the Pacific,” Jacobin (April 22, 2022)
“Egotopia,” Counterpunch (Aug. 23, 2018)
"Lxs anarquistas," Latin American Research Review (2023)
In the news
- New Klarman Fellows to join the College of Arts and Sciences
- Cornell adds 3 A.D. White Professors to celebrated roster
- Twelve new Klarman Fellows to pursue innovative, timely research in A&S
- California Forever plans prove ‘colonizing spirit’ still exists
- Shadow of former dictatorship hangs heavy in Chile
- History department begins three-year active learning initiative
- Craib and Fiani win graduate, professional teaching prize
- Think twice before founding that free-market utopia
- Ten A&S faculty honored with endowed professorships
- Book retrieval effort gives grad student welcome relief
- Six on faculty receive Einaudi Center grants for international work
- Einaudi Center welcomes new program directors
- Small grants fire up new research in the social sciences
- Einaudi Center to provide research help to doctoral students
- Historian to speak on American exceptionalism
- Catching the research bug
- Atkinson Center gives record number of seed research grants
- Social Science institute supports nine A&S faculty projects
