The Hidden Globe
How Wealth Hacks the World
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- 4,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
NAMED ONE OF THE TOP 5 BOOKS OF 2024 ON CBS SUNDAY MORNING
ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST'S TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2024
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
“Vivid, revelatory, and politically unpredictable…What bothers Abrahamian, in the end, isn’t the anarchic but the unfair; if capital is free, people deserve the same respect.” —Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker
"A season of unrest looms ahead, and The Hidden Globe lays out the unvarnished truth in a luminous feat of reportage.”—Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. A journalist’s riveting account exposes a parallel universe that has become a haven for the rich and powerful.
A globe shows the world we think we know: neatly delineated sovereign nations that grant or restrict their citizens’ rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside their borders, however, another universe has been engineered into existence. It consists of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, and increasingly for the benefit of the wealthiest individuals and corporations.
Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of this hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed their only commodity: bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Over time, economists, theorists, statesmen, and consultants evolved ever more sophisticated ways of exporting and exploiting statelessness, in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers, charter cities controlled by foreign corporations, and even into outer space. By mapping this countergeography, which decides who wins and who loses in the new global order—and helping us to see how it might be otherwise—The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires.
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Journalist Abrahamian (The Cosmopolites) takes a revelatory look at a globe-spanning collection of "offshore jurisdictions," "legal black holes," and "free zones" that she argues form a "frontier" where nations "abdicate" their law-enforcing powers in aid of tax-evading elites or use loopholes to skirt their own laws. Abrahamian begins by delving into the histories of contemporary tax havens and "freeports" (starting with her hometown of Geneva, where since 1888 the Geneva Freeport has sheltered high-value items from taxation), but her scope is far broader; she also highlights ways in which new and evolving 20th- and 21st-century types of "liminal" spaces contribute to this "mercenary world order." These include cruise ships used for "shipboard interdiction," a form of legal gymnastics developed in the 1960s by the U.S. to house migrants in a borderless no-man's land; and the recent divvying up of space by small wealthy countries like Tonga, now the sixth-largest owner of orbital slots for satellites. She also profiles figures deeply enmeshed in this world, including Claude de Baissac, a French businessman who advises developing nations on the creation of free zones. Providing poetic insight into what drew him to such spaces, an unapologetic de Baissac says, "It's... the out-of-pattern-ness, and the idiosyncrasy"—a sentiment shared by Abrahamian, who perceptively analyzes these zones as neither "all good, nor all evil," but as "cracks" that reveal how the world really works. It's an impressive achievement.
