Ships, and the oceans they sail, are governed by a confounding tangle of laws. No one state exercises sovereignty over the high seas, so ships are subject to a complex—and easily ignored—combination of international maritime law, treaties, and the national codes of coastal states and flag-granting countries; at times they seem to defy terrestrial rules altogether.

Over the past few decades journalists and academics have chronicled the “lawless ocean,” documenting widespread human rights abuses in the shipping and fishing industries and what might be termed “the outlaw sea.”^* In Empty Vessel, Ian Kumekawa, a historian at MIT and Harvard, finds that the seas are in fact replete with laws—but that many of them are designed to get around other laws, to exploit or create loopholes, or to obtain regulatory and tax advantages, all with the goal of maximizing profits for shipping companies. This parallel offshore universe of laws and contracts was slowly built up by lawyers, corporations, and territories that function as tax havens, enabling them to reap profit without paying their due—and becoming central to what we call globalization.

Empty Vessel tells the story of a single barge, from its construction at a Swedish dockyard nearly half a century ago to its current status as a rusty, “laid up” accommodation barge for oil workers in the port of Onne in Nigeria. (The book also cursorily follows its sister ship, an identical vessel built at the same time, which had a similar course over the years.) By tracking the ship’s many lives—as a floating barrack for British troops during the Falklands War, as a prison ship moored at Pier 36 in Lower Manhattan and then in Portland, England, and as a temporary housing barge for assembly line workers in West Germany—Kumekawa charts the dramatic transformations that the world economy has undergone since the 1980s: globalization, the decline of manufacturing, financialization, neoliberalism. The ship’s trajectory lays bare both the physical infrastructure of the global economy—in the form of ships, ports, and the workers who operate them—and the invisible legal architecture without which it would be impossible.

The majority of ships crisscrossing the oceans today carry goods. In contrast, the Vessel, as Kumekawa refers to the frequently renamed and reflagged ship, was designed with an eye to eventually providing housing for offshore oil rig workers, lacking its own propulsion mechanism and typically requiring other ships to pull it along. It was brought into the world at Finnboda, a struggling government-owned shipyard outside Stockholm, in 1979. Sweden, Norway, and other Northern European countries were facing a dramatic decline of their shipping industries due to the oil crisis of the early 1970s and the subsequent economic slump, as well as increased competition from East Asian countries. Shipping companies nimble enough to adapt pivoted to ship management and other services—for example, those geared toward offshore oil explorations in the North Sea, then being developed as an alternative to the volatile Middle East.

The Vessel’s first potential owner was a Norwegian shipping magnate named Parley Augustsson, who planned to buy it through a shell company. Augustsson had—for a while, at least—perfected rolling with the economic tides, taking advantage of lingering state support for important industries and the new investment opportunities that cropped up as Norway’s economy, like others in the Global North, shifted toward financialization. A provision in the Norwegian tax code allowed individuals to write off investments in Norwegian shipping—an intentional loophole in the country’s very high tax rates meant to support the struggling maritime industries. Augustsson created an empire of more than one hundred subsidiary and partnership companies, recruiting scores of investors who relished the tax savings.

Augustsson took possession of the Vessel, but when financial trouble struck, he was unable to make the payments. (He went bankrupt in the mid-1980s, his company group wildly overleveraged and the fleet of vessels underlying it hugely overvalued thanks to their use as tax-dodging investment devices.) The ship was returned to Finnboda and resold to Consafe, a Swedish company specializing in offshore oil services, and underwent renovations and reconfigurations to replace the modest wooden housing structure that Augustsson had installed with large, state-of-the-art accommodation units that could fit some three hundred men. It also gained new gathering spaces, squash courts, and a swimming pool. But something other than North Sea oil fields lay in store for the Vessel. Bibby Line, a traditional British shipping company that was casting around for ways to broaden its portfolio (it spent over a century serving the British Empire and had originally grown out of investments in the slave trade), took a 20 percent stake in Consafe in 1982. That same year, Britain entered one of its last imperial skirmishes when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, and through Bibby Line, Consafe leased the Vessel to the British government. In 1983 it was whisked off to Stanley, the capital of the Falklands, where after Argentina’s defeat it housed British troops stationed to deter the Argentines from returning and trying again.

Once the Vessel left the Falkland Islands, Bibby Line reregistered it in the Bahamas, where it acquired a Bahamian flag—a so-called flag of convenience. Such schemes proliferated after World War II and grew enormously in the 1970s and 1980s, as European seafarers were being replaced by cheaper workers from the Global South. To get around manning and wage requirements on European-flagged vessels, owners registered their ships in countries such as Panama and Liberia instead. Ships that sailed under those flags also avoided the higher taxes and safety standards that applied in traditional maritime countries in Europe and North America, saving their owners millions. Today about 70 percent of the world’s ships by tonnage sail under flags of convenience.

Bibby Line eventually bought the Vessel outright in the 1980s, renamed it the Bibby Resolution, and again refitted it, this time to be leased to the German company Volkswagen as temporary housing for assembly-line workers. Though it had been the biggest exporter of cars in the world two decades earlier, VW was now facing similar headwinds as other manufacturers: wages were high, demand was sagging, and serious competition was emerging from Japanese carmakers. VW sought to wiggle out of this crisis in a very German way, moving most of its production abroad and relying on fewer but more highly skilled workers at home, while at the same time pursuing technological and management improvements to cushion the effects of a smaller workforce. Its old plant in Emden, a city near the Dutch-German border on the river Ems, was updated to offer fully automated assembly. The Vessel, bobbing on the Ems, housed VW workers brought in from other German plants to be trained on the modernized factory floor.

Kumekawa elegantly combines the view from the bridge of the Vessel with a bird’s-eye perspective on the broader economic forces bearing down everywhere. One of those places was New York City—specifically Pier 36 on the East River, where the Vessel arrived in 1989. New York had fallen victim to the same manufacturing decline that had upended the Swedish and Norwegian maritime industries, and the city’s industrial waterfronts, once vibrant centers of maritime activity and small factories, now lay largely derelict. Pier 36 had been inaugurated in 1965, a testament to the widespread optimism about shipping’s ever-growing importance in global trade during the postwar years; stiff competition lay just across the Hudson, where New Jersey and the Port of New York Authority were eagerly building port facilities.

But everything changed in the 1960s with the advent of containerization: the invention of standardized steel boxes that could be loaded onto trains and ships by cranes. Shipowners borrowed millions to construct more of the new container ships of ever greater size and carrying capacity. Then the oil crisis drastically decreased demand, and suddenly too many ships were chasing too little freight.

The sheer size of container ships and the speed of loading and transportation led to the decline of Pier 36 only a few years after it was built: containers had to be moved by truck and train and unloaded and loaded again by cranes, and the lot at Pier 36 was simply too small to accommodate both ships and the requisite machinery. The expanded port on the Jersey side of the Hudson faced far fewer constraints. By the 1970s it was the largest container port in the world, thanks to a vast network of rail links built on cheap land around the Jersey site, though it has long since been eclipsed by many ports, several of them Chinese.

A decade later Pier 36 lay vacant, like New York’s older port facilities in Manhattan and Brooklyn. New jobs never materialized; the old ones moved to New Jersey. Kumekawa shows how global transformations, such as the effects of containerization, intersected with some of Ronald Reagan’s national economic policies, like the war on drugs: industry disappeared, and partly as a result, unemployment rose, homelessness followed, and arrest and incarceration rates surged, especially among people of color. At the same time, welfare and support programs were withdrawn under the banner of individual responsibility and a small state. The Bibby Resolution arrived in the city in 1989 not as part of the maritime industry but to be leased by a desperate New York City Department of Correction as an offshore jail.

Mayor Ed Koch’s tough-on-crime policies meant the city urgently needed more prison space. On land, getting the required approval for constructing or repurposing buildings could take years. The Vessel, on the other hand, moored at Pier 36, skirted land use laws, zoning regulations, and permit procedures. It opened a month after arriving.

The prison barge was also used to offer a response to mounting criticism that New York’s policing and carceral system was brutal and uncaring. In August 1990 Congressman Chuck Schumer and his fellow members of the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice crammed into the Vessel’s gym for a special hearing. They had chosen the venue to show off the Vessel as a new tool in the war on drugs, a jail that incorporated a substance abuse treatment center for up to 384 people.

A few former inmates spoke favorably to news outlets at the time about conditions aboard the barge, although it’s hard to know today what life was really like. Plenty of its inmates, disproportionately more than in other jails and prisons, filed grievances about conditions aboard the Vessel.

In 1997 the British government, in response to its own surging incarceration rates, bought the Vessel. The ship was moved to Portland, a small town on a strategically important island off the picturesque Dorset coast. Portland has a rich history as a military site, but in 1995 its nineteenth-century naval base had been shuttered. The Vessel would provide new jobs where old ones had been lost. After refurbishing, it was able to accommodate nearly five hundred minimum-security beds, about 120 more than while moored in New York. But several years into the Vessel’s Portland stint, only around 360 prisoners were held there. Initial reports and testimony from the incarcerated were favorable, although other documentation highlighted the suspected abuse of an inmate by staff and attempted suicides. By then, though, the ship was more than twenty years old; the air-conditioning was prone to failing, and other aging bits and parts made for a particularly scathing inspection report in 2004. The jail aboard the Vessel closed in 2005.

Empty Vessel is particularly good at evoking the momentous changes that economic forces wrought on the environment, especially on urban waterfronts in the Global North. The Stockholm shipyard where the Vessel was built was eventually shuttered, replaced in recent decades by sleek modern apartment buildings and shopping centers. The old dockyard at Finnboda wharf is now part of an upscale residential complex. Similar developments have remade ports across the world, from London’s former docklands to Barcelona, Vancouver, and Shanghai; Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, Boston’s Seaport District, and the inner-city areas of Hamburg, the northern German port city where I grew up, have been transformed beyond recognition.

Such changes were still tied to the “global offshore,” as Kumekawa terms it. In New York and Portland, the Vessel continued to take advantage of its ambiguous legal status. While docked steps from the Williamsburg Bridge, it was still registered in the Bahamas, presumably to allow Bibby Line to keep dodging taxes. The offshore economy requires such legal fictions, including the idea that it can be neatly separated from the “real” economy onshore. If we stopped pretending that the Vessel was a Bahamian ship because of its registration and flag—despite its British owner, despite its New York lessor, despite its likely never having set anchor in or near the Bahamas, despite its lack of any other meaningful connection to the islands—the infrastructure of offshoring would crumble.

In 2007 the Vessel was embroiled in a court case that threatened its offshore legal standing. The British government had just sold it to a Hong Kong–based maritime services company, Pacific Maritime (Asia), which quickly resold it to a shell company named Holystone Overseas, set up in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands. Behind Holystone was the Sea Trucks Group, a Nigerian company specializing in offshore oil services. Holystone itself owned nothing more than a single ship, the Vessel. The memorandum of agreement that accompanied the sale stipulated that disagreements would be resolved not before the national British courts but by the London Court of International Arbitration.

Courts like this one, staffed by a select cohort of international arbitration lawyers, are yet another part of the offshore economy. Like other private arbitration tribunals, the London court (which has existed since the late nineteenth century) operates entirely behind closed doors. Over the past decades, more and more companies have chosen to adjudicate disagreements before these courts, ostensibly for reasons of privacy and efficiency—national court systems can be slow. But probably more important is the hope of getting a better deal in a forum where the politics and potential interests of host countries and their citizens don’t stand in the way.

We know about the dispute over the Vessel only because Pacific Maritime deliberately moved the case to the British court system while the barge was still docked at Portland. As part of the sale, the Sea Trucks Group had agreed to separate some of the Vessel’s accommodation units and return them to Pacific Maritime to use for other purposes. The Nigerians were seemingly in no hurry to deliver these units and were perhaps preparing to move the Vessel out of British waters without compensating Pacific Maritime. In order to get an injunction from a court that had actual powers over the port, the Hong Kong company brought the case before the British commercial court, which decided in its favor and prevented the Vessel from leaving. (The details of Pacific Maritime’s compensation were hashed out behind the closed doors of arbitration.) The case became an important touchstone for delineating the limits of arbitration: the concept of a self-contained offshore world had run up against the realities of power and enforcement.

Kumekawa argues convincingly that the life of the Vessel “offers a window onto the profound and dynamic changes that have buffeted and shaped the world economy over the past forty years.” But it’s important to remember that, its recent Nigerian stint aside, the Vessel spent most of its life in Europe and North America. After all, the Vessel was conceived from the start as a response to Europe’s declining maritime fortunes, part of an attempt to keep European shipyards up and running by turning away from traditional shipbuilding. The Vessel and its sister ship, Kumekawa writes, “were meant to be temporary, mobile, adaptable, fluid. It was their ability to take on new roles and meanings—to code-switch—that made them so valuable.”

But the forces that ripped through industry in Europe and North America had very different effects in the Global South. And arguably it was there that the most staggering upheavals of these transformative decades played out: not at Finnboda or in Lower Manhattan but in the massive shipyards that have sprung up around Shanghai and at other Asian ports. Shanghai is now the world’s busiest container port; six of the ten busiest container ports in the world are in China. The reorganization of manufacturing supply chains in the Global South over the past fifty years has been nothing short of revolutionary. Once largely agricultural economies have become manufacturing powerhouses where workers produce goods for Walmart, Nike, and other Western multinationals. Shenzhen, where China’s Communist leaders first allowed limited experiments with capitalism, went from a small market town in the early 1980s to one of the largest and richest megacities in the world. Apple products are assembled there in factories run by the Taiwanese company Foxconn, which is one of the largest corporations on the planet. Such success has pushed the quest for cheaper industrial labor even further.

These transformations have lifted millions out of extreme poverty. For better and for worse, the lives swept up in this vortex are unrecognizable compared with even the recent past. Only a little over a generation ago, Shenzhen’s workers would have toiled in agricultural village economies, often under severe hardship, with no prospect of a different life. Today, once they arrive in Shenzhen and similar cities, internal migrants have few rights and are cut off from even basic welfare benefits. At night they cram into crowded dormitories, not unlike the European immigrants stuffed into poorly ventilated tenements on the Lower East Side a century ago. Similar changes are slowly unfolding in Southeast Asia: as China has developed industries of its own, it is now often Chinese capital that fuels the supply chain revolution’s expansion into Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Cambodia.

The experiences of these workers have also changed in more subtle ways that relate to the global offshore. Apple, Nike, and the like typically do not own the facilities at which their products are assembled. Instead, they subcontract with Foxconn and similar intermediaries, which in turn hire workers on flexible temporary contracts. Often these workers are located in so-called special economic zones like Shenzhen, where taxes are lower than they are in the surrounding country and where the application of labor laws is often sketchy. Such arrangements also let companies like Apple hand off the enforcement of repressive working conditions to the intermediary. Foxconn factories are managed like military camps. Workers undergo lengthy security checks to ensure nobody brings a phone or camera to record the process, and they are required to buy special bras and belts made without metal to avoid setting off security alerts. Foxconn is thought to generally comply better with labor laws than smaller companies do, yet it is also notorious for high rates of suicide among its workers. When a Foxconn worker kills herself—as eighteen workers attempted in 2010 alone—Apple washes its hands of liability. (After the first reports of suicide emerged, the company installed nets outside buildings to catch falling bodies. Widespread international media attention appears to have led to some improvements and fewer suicides since.)

During its final active stint in Nigeria, the Vessel was more “offshore” than ever before: registered in the tax haven of St. Vincent and the Grenadines—whose ship registry is administered by two other tax havens, Switzerland and Monaco—and owned by a Nigerian company in the British Virgin Islands. It hosted oil workers for a few years in the oil boomtown of Onne in the Niger Delta, within the port’s free zone—a tax haven for oil and gas companies. By 2016, the Vessel was “laid up,” no longer in use, overgrown with mold. Maintenance of the aging ship eventually became too costly for the struggling owners.

As of 2023, the ship was still near Onne, which is now Nigeria’s second-largest port. Such megaports have certainly created new livelihoods. But they have also required dredging to accommodate ever larger ships, significant land reclamation, and the relocation of entire villages and communities in adjacent areas. “As zones expand, long-time residents are displaced, ancestral practices cut off, and economies and ecologies disrupted,” Kumekawa writes. “Dredging has destroyed fishing grounds and maimed palm forests,” and air pollution causes vomiting, headaches, and nausea. For every waterfront revitalization project in Europe or North America, there is a port somewhere else that was not downsized and cleaned up but expanded, often at appalling cost.

The Vessel’s sister ship was broken up for scrap in Alang, India, home to the world’s largest shipbreaking site. Working conditions are so gruesome at Alang and other yards in Bangladesh and Pakistan that the International Labour Organization classifies shipbreaking as one of the most hazardous occupations in the world. As a result laws in many countries prevent ships that fly their colors from using these yards; the circumvention of these regulations is another amenity offered by the flag of St. Kitts and Nevis, where the sister ship was finally registered. The lives of millions of workers are changed by the abdications of responsibility that legal abstractions like shell companies and flags of convenience make possible—another hidden cost of the global offshore.