Empty Vessel
The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge
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- 249,00 Kč
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- 249,00 Kč
Publisher Description
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A KIRKUS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR • The rise of globalization and financialization as seen from a barge—one Swedish barge, to be exact, built in 1979
"The many-headed hydra of neoliberalism has found its chronicler." —Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton
"I’ve rarely read a book that so deftly entwines a single, accessible story with the broad forces of globalization. A stunningly original history." —Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch
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? The Balder Scapa: a single barge that served all three roles. Though the name would eventually change to Finnboda 12. And then to Safe Esperia. And later on, to the Bibby Resolution. And after that . . . in short, a vessel with so many names, and so many fates, that to keep it in our sights—as the protagonist of this fascinating economic parable—Ian Kumekawa has no choice but to call it, simply, the Vessel.
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.
Empty Vessel is a jaw-dropping microhistory that speaks volumes about the global economy as a whole. In following the Vessel—and its Sister Vessel, built alongside it in Stockholm—from one thankless task to the next, Kumekawa connects the dots of a neoliberal world order in the making, where regulation is for suckers and “Made in USA” feels almost quaint.
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This incisive study from Kumekawa (The First Serious Optimist), an economic history professor at Harvard University, uses an oceangoing barge as a window onto the global economy. The barge, which changed hands and names so many times Kumekawa refers to it simply as "the Vessel," was constructed in 1979 in a Swedish shipyard that was soon bankrupted by lower-wage competition in South Korea and Taiwan. As offshore oil drilling boomed in the early 1980s, the barge housed rig workers in "slightly modified standard shipping containers." From 1989 to 1994, the vessel was moored in Manhattan to help accommodate New York City's swelling prison population, a development Kumekawa uses to critique the war on drugs and the Reagan administration's shrinking of the welfare state. A final assignment housing workers in Nigeria's offshore oil industry illustrates the corruption and volatility endemic to the petroleum sector. Kumekawa also looks in on the vessel's sister ship, whose registration under a flag of convenience allowed its Indian owner to abandon the barge and its crew in Namibia without paying them in 2018. Kumekawa presents the vessel as a grim symbol of a global capitalism that drifts wherever labor is cheapest, taxes lowest, and regulations weakest. The result is a cleverly conceived appraisal of the international economy's troubled recent history. Photos.
