The Hidden Globe
How Wealth Hacks the World
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- 9,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
'This book did nothing less than make me re-see the world . . . Original, and very clever' - Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland
Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. A journalist’s riveting account exposes a parallel universe exempt from the laws of the land, and how the wealthy and powerful benefit from it.
The map of the globe shows the world we think we know: sovereign nations that grant and restrict their citizens’ rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside its neatly delineated borders, however, a parallel universe has been engineered into existence, consisting of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, increasingly for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful.
Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of the hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed the commodity they had—bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Following its evolution around the world, she reveals how prize-winning economists, eccentric theorists, visionary statesmen, and consultants masterminded its export in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers where immigrants languish in limbo, and charter cities controlled by by foreign governments and multinational foreign corporations—and even into outer space, where tiny Luxembourg aspires to mining rights on asteroids.
By mapping the hidden geography that decides who wins and who loses in this new global order—and how it might be otherwise—The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires.
'Atossa Abrahamian boldly renews our sense of reality and brilliantly illuminates our political impasse.' - Pankaj Mishra, author of The Age of Anger
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
