Since the late 20th century, the rise of offshore capitalism – financial systems operating outside of state regulatory and tax jurisdictions – has raised questions around traditional land jurisdiction and ownership in the global economy. Reflagged ships, foreign trade zones, and deregulated financial centers illustrate how labor, capital, and infrastructure can slip across borders and outside of federal legal oversight.
In his new book Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge, historian Ian Kumekawa presents a micro-history of offshore capitalism through the life of a single vessel—rebuilt, reflagged, and radically repurposed across decades of multinational ownership, from the North Sea oil fields to the Gulf of Guinea. The George Barrett Social Justice Program at Vanderbilt Law hosted Kumekama earlier this month, where he discussed the barge’s stint at Manhattan’s Pier 36 on the East River. There, he argued, the vessel’s story captures the blurred line between “onshore” and “offshore” jurisdictions, set at a port he described as a tale of “dramatic aspiration and dramatic failure.”
The vessel’s lifetime has spanned global ordinances and lack thereof.
Each of the book’s 10 chapters illustrates specific geographic phase in the vessel’s journey: from the The Baltic Sea to the The Gulf of Guinea and International Waters.
The vessel’s life began in a nationalized Swedish shipyard in the late 1970s, built with heavy government subsidies. Acquired by a Norwegian shipping magnate, it was first used as an accommodation for North Sea oil workers. It later served as barracks for British troops in the Falklands, temporary housing for Volkswagen workers in West Germany, a prison in New York and later the United Kingdom, and a dormitory for oil and gas workers in a Nigerian free-trade zone.
“The barge has always been between or outside formal jurisdictions,” Kumekawa explained. “The offshore itself is a relational category. It’s defined in opposition to the onshore. If the onshore world is safe, reputable, and secure, then the offshore world is dangerous, lawless, wild, a place where power is more diffuse.”
An under-regulated solution to New York City’s jail crisis.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Department of Correction sought emergency jail capacity amid surging arrests stemming from from “quality of life” policing and the war on drugs. The floating barge offered a legal workaround. Unlike land-based facilities, it did not require the city’s lengthy Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, nor did it fall squarely within municipal jurisdiction. “This is why they had such appeal,” Kumekawa explained.
“The barge was also offshore in a much more abstract sense. It fell out of local jurisdiction and local ordinances, and this infuriated its critics,” he noted. “But behind closed doors, everyone agrees that shunting prisoners onto barges is ridiculous. It’s an expedient made necessary by a set of exceptional emergency conditions.”
The barge illustrates the duality of offshore capitalism.
On one hand, it was treated as an abstract object—legally contested and moved between jurisdictions to avoid regulation and reduce taxes and labor costs. On the other, it was a tangible structure that contained workers, soldiers, and prisoners. The vessel’s legal identity could be shifted far more easily than its steel frame. Its adaptability was what made it valuable.
“It’s been an abstract legal object registered in tax haven after tax haven,” Kumekawa highlighted. “But at the same time, for all this abstraction, the vessel has always been inescapably physical.”
Chronicling one barge, Kumekawa demonstrates how neoliberal globalization operates through physical infrastructure that shape law and policy, often relying on “band-aid solutions” like the vessel that uniquely capitalize on the blurred boundaries of the offshore.
