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The rise of globalization and financialization as seen from a barge--one Swedish barge, to be exact, built in 1979 What do a barracks for British troops in the Falklands War, a floating jail off the Bronx, and temporary housing for VW factory workers in Germany have in common? ;;;;Despite its sturdy steel structure, weighing 9,500 deadweight tons, the Vessel is a figure as elusive and abstract as the offshore market it comes to embody: a world of island tax havens, exploited labor forces, free banking zones, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and mass incarceration, where even the prisoners are held offshore. Fitted with modular shipping containers, themselves the product of standardized global trade, the ship could become whatever the market demanded. Whether caught in an international dispute involving Hong Kong, Nigeria, Indonesia, and the Virgin Islands--to be settled in an English court of law--or flying yet another foreign “flag of convenience” to mask its ownership--the barge is ever a container for forces much larger than even its hulking self.; ;;;
About the author
IAN KUMEKAWA is a historian at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University. He is the author of The First Serious Optimist: A. C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics (2017), which won the Joseph J. Spengler Prize. He has taught at Harvard and MIT. He hails from Clinton, CT and now lives in Boston.
