Chris Miller

Chris Miller is an American historian whose Chip War (2022) explains semiconductor production as a network of concentrated technical and industrial dependencies. As at 29 July 2026, Tufts University lists him as Professor of International History at the Fletcher School (Tufts profile). The book has shaped public debate about US-China technology controls, but it is not evidence that any particular control was adopted because of Miller's work.

The work

Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, published by Scribner in 2022 and winner of that year's Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award, is a history of the semiconductor industry as a strategic contest, from the Cold War origins of Silicon Valley and the Soviet failure to copy it, through Japan's 1980s challenge, to the extreme concentration of the present: leading-edge fabrication dominated by TSMC in Taiwan, lithography at the most advanced node monopolised by ASML in the Netherlands, and design tooling and IP concentrated in the United States and its allies. Miller's framing is explicitly about power: whoever controls these nodes can deny the inputs of modern computing, and the network is too expensive and too intricate for any state to replicate quickly. His earlier scholarship on the Soviet and Russian economies, including Putinomics (2018), shaped the book's attention to how command economies fail at innovation races.

Significance

Chip War is a widely read narrative companion to analysis of the Semiconductor chokepoint. It maps the concentrated capabilities that also appear in debates over the United States advanced-computing and semiconductor controls on China (2022-present) and the Huawei campaign, but the timing and design of those controls require evidence from policy records rather than inference from the book's influence. Whether denial accelerates Chinese indigenisation faster than it slows Chinese capability remains contested. Miller's account of earlier embargoes, leakage and substitution supplies evidence for both sides. The book also gives historical depth to the technology wing of weaponised interdependence scholarship.

See also

Semiconductor chokepoint · United States advanced-computing and semiconductor controls on China (2022-present) · United States Entity List and foreign direct product rule campaign against Huawei (2019-present) · Weaponised interdependence · Export control as strategic instrument · TSMC · ASML

Sources

• Tufts University, Fletcher School, "Christopher Miller", profile current to 29 July 2026.
• Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology (New York: Scribner, 2022).
• Chris Miller, Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
• United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security, Implementation of Additional Export Controls: Certain Advanced Computing Items and Semiconductor Manufacturing Items, 87 FR 62186 (13 October 2022).