Harry Churchill

Overview

I am a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chile and Latin America, specializing in property regimes, state formation, and commodity frontiers. My dissertation, Property, the State, and Society in Chile, 1850–1914, is a social history of property relations and the role of the state in driving economic development. It examines how state formation, world-market expansion, and Chile’s unique integration into the global economy shaped the kind of property rights that existed in the South Pacific and the nature of ownership. The study focuses on three arenas of contestation between the state, the propertied, and the propertyless: agricultural land in the southern region of Araucanía, nitrate territories and subsoil rights in the northern territories, and real estate in land and buildings in the rapidly growing city of Santiago, the capital. Changes in one of these arenas precipitated changes in the others as capital moved freely between them. Through these case studies, the dissertation aims to show how competing claims over land, resources, and use rights were configured—and how this was experienced in quotidian life—during a period of galloping export-led growth and economic modernization.

My research is supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at Cornell’s Einaudi Center for International Studies. Prior to Cornell, I was a research fellow at the University of Bremen, where I explored the relationship between trade protectionism and social policy in twentieth-century Argentina. Among my other interests are the history of globalization, the history of geoeconomics, and spatial theory.

Advisors: Ray Craib, Ernesto Bassi, Nick Mulder