Underground Leviathan explores the emergence, dynamics, and lasting impacts of a mining firm, the United States Company. Through its exercise of sovereign power across the borders of North America in the early twentieth century, the transnational US Company shaped the business, environmental, political, and scientific landscape. Between its initial incorporation in Maine in 1906 and its final demise in the 1980s, the mining company held properties in Utah, Colorado, California, Nevada, Alaska, Mexico, and Canada. The firm was a prototypical management-ruled corporation, which strategically planned and manipulated the technological, production, economic, urban, environmental, political, and cultural activities wherever it operated, all while shaping social actors internationally, including managers, engineers, workers, neighbors, and farmers.

Author Israel G. Solares examines how the twentieth century multinational firm established and articulated multinational corporate sovereignty in ways that reflect other multinational titans, like the East Asian Trade companies, and presages the digital giants and space corporations of the twenty-first century. Bridging the domineering practices used during the colonization of Southern Asia with the futuristic colonies on the Moon, Underground Leviathan documents the cost of a corporation’s unyielding desire to consume the secrets at the center of the Earth.

Israel G. Solares is an associate researcher in the Department of Mathematical Modeling of Social Systems at the Institute for Research in Applied Mathematics and Systems, UNAM. He was born and raised in Zacapan, Xochimilco and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics at Facultad de Economía, UNAM and a master’s and PhD in history at El Colegio de Mexico. Solares is currently working on a research project on the global history of engineering alongside Ted Betty from the University of Notre Dame. Underground Leviathan is his first book.