Jordan Howell

• History 1380 - Introduction to Modern World History
• History 4320 - Global Capitalism
• History 7910 - Global Capitalism

Jordan Howell is a historian of the United States in the world, with a focus on the Caribbean. He writes and teaches about empire, capitalism, and the environment. Howell’s first book, Imperial Crucible: Working for Alcoa in the Age of Empire (under contract with Columbia University Press), is about the Aluminum Company of America. It tells the story of a company that generated handsome fortunes for its founders, embroiled itself in political debates about private power in public life, and dammed rivers, built smelters, and dug mines across the American, British, and Dutch empires. At the heart of this corporate drama was a transimperial working class that built and fought Alcoa in the twentieth century. 

Howell’s research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Charles Warren Center for Studies of American History. 

• PhD, Harvard University, 2022
• MA, University of British Columbia, 2016
• BA, University of British Columbia, 2013

Research interests

• United States in the world
• Caribbean history
• Race, labor, and migration
• Imperial history
• Environmental history

• "Capital Prospects: Jamaica and the Environmental History of Postwar Decolonization," Environmental History 28, no. 1 (January 2023): 133-159.
• "Bauxite, Michael Manley, and the Workers without History," in Extractivism and Labour in the Caribbean, ed. Dennis C. Canterbury (New York: Routledge 2023), 156-173.