Henry Jacob

Henry is a History Ph.D. student. Before graduate school, he was a Fulbright researcher in Panama. In addition, he received an M.Phil. in World History at Cambridge as a Henry Fellow and a B.A. in History from Yale. He studies efforts to control two interoceanic passageways through the Americas, the Northwest Passage and the Panama Canal. After countless attempts to forge maritime shortcuts over centuries, both routes were first crossed in the early 1900s. Henry examines how these sites of global mobility, once traversed, also attracted increased local settlement. He considers how figures from extractive, scientific, military, and tourist bodies engaged with Indigenous peoples and the nearby ecosystems. These uneven interactions engendered sets of paradoxical notions about the two sites. The areas were seen as desirable and dangerous, historical and ahistorical, or barren and abundant. Even if these concepts were unstable, their corresponding actions left significant marks on the regions surrounding these waterways. Henry therefore asks how the history of these oceanic paths over the past century can provide insights into current and future issues in environmental governance.