Underground Leviathan: Corporate Sovereignty and Mining in the Americas

Underground Leviathan: Corporate Sovereignty and Mining in the Americas by Israel G. Solares for the first time tells the history of the United States Company. Incorporated for tax reasons in Maine in 1906, this multinational mining corporation soon operated mining operations in Utah, Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and other states. After World War II, the company eased out of mining, going out of business altogether in the 1980s.Solares bases his analysis on Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, which describes how a unified political entity emerges from many individual actors. Underground Leviathan treats the corporation as a quasi-sovereign entity that stretches across borders and to a degree operates independently of national control. Underground Leviathan does not follow the history of the company chronologically but proceeds thematically. Taking his cue from Hobbes, Solares views corporations as made up of a multitude of individuals who must balance competing interests in order to operate successfully as a corporate unity. The author offers Leviathan as a general model for understanding the modern multinational corporation.Underground Leviathan thus does not follow the standard script of a corporation's rise, maturity, and decline. Hobbes divided his analysis into three segments—matter, form, and power—which Solares applies to the U.S. Company as mining and waste (pollution), organization, and management and labor, respectively. Each chapter analyzes one of these three themes (matter, form, and power) using incidents and situations from the various operations of the company from Alaska to Mexico. One chapter (chapter 3) focuses on the professional network of engineers and geologists in the company and in academia that the corporation created and that helped create the company.Each chapter comprises many short narratives from across the company's operations. Solares primarily draws on company archives and local sources. He is a Mexican author, and the dissertation on which the book is based was in Spanish, so it is unsurprising that more material comes from Mexico than elsewhere. A good portion of the rest deals with the firm's operations in Utah. The effect is rather kaleidoscopic as one story follows the other in quick succession. Readers interested in the United States Company or in its operations at some locality will find information packed into the chapters.Too much is required of the reader, however. Each chapter begins and ends with contextualizing sections. The body of each chapter, on the other hand, lacks signposts to guide the reader to the significance of each short narrative and explain how this particular story supports the larger point. Paragraphs lack topic sentences. The text is never far from the archives and contains a great deal of detail. Names, places, and particulars often appear once without recurring subsequently. The text moves from one incident to another without transitions. The information is there for the reader to interpret and put together into a larger cohesive narrative.The interpretive device of Hobbes's Leviathan is reasonably interesting. The book would really make more sense, though, as a traditional narrative of the origins, development, and decline of this corporation. Each historical stage perhaps might be divided into subchapters that continue the tripartite framework of analysis. As it is, the book gives little sense of the trajectory of the company as a whole or in its constituent parts. The epilogue just sketches the decline of the corporation since 1945, leaving it vague why the U.S. Company failed to adapt and survive.Dividing the material thematically also leaves unclear how the units of upper management and investors, local management, geology and mining professionals, labor, local and national political figures, and natural resources and mining waste worked together as a coherent international corporation—a Leviathan, if you will. Moreover, how did the relationship of the interdependent parts evolve over the decades?The translation, by the author, is generally clear. The quantity of undigested detail, which Solares does not overly justify, makes the book heavier going than it need be.