EMPTY VESSEL: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge, the best kind of economic microhistory

EMPTY VESSEL: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge
IAN KUMEKAWA
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

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Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The rise of globalization and financialization as seen from a barge—one Swedish barge, to be exact, built in 1979

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, 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 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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My Review: I love microhistories. They're so sweeping. They explain so much of life, and politics, and economics. Marc Levinson's terrific THE BOX: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, for a foundational read in this subject, is another sweeping microhistory to read and enjoy. Or maybe "value" is a better word; the prose in a microhistory is of secondary importance. Clarity is, or should be, the author of a microhistory's primary aim.

Author Kumekawa, Harvard historian by day, read that lesson, internalized it, and applies it to every piece of this complex-but-not-complicated story of the modern world using one barge's life history. The interconnectedness of the global economy, the ways and means of the greedy to avoid scrutiny...always, always it boils down to greed...and detailing the astonishing accumulation of profit from unglamourous quotidian needs-meeting.

What makes the story of a floatel/mobile military barracks/overflow prison as engrossing in this book is the carefully constructed mental diagram of interconnections of the barge's redesigns and refits and destinations. It was, however, that very complexity that knocked off my fifth star. Just too much work needed to follow them all to derive the full import of his points will cost even the most felicitous of writers a star. Shopping for the least profit-trimming places to "register" the barge...that's code for "who will take a small enough bribe for it to be cheaper than actual safety maintenance?"...as seaworthy and owned by a legitimate business has kept the author's research interesting. I expect his search history caused the FBI, NSA, and other initialism-yclept shadow dwellers a good deal of curiosity.

Why I myownself want you to read it is that it uses something very simple as a lens to focus attention on the quiet parts of capitalism that very badly need saying out loud. The money the owners of this barge collected was never huge, but was "protected" from taxation so greater in effect than simple face value. It is the fundament...double sense very much intended...of international capital's business model.

In case you're new here, I do not subscribe to the "greed is good" mindset.

Author Kumekawa's done us a solid in getting curious one day when he heard of a prison barge moored in New York City's river. (I think it's the East River, but can't be sure...could be the Bronx River, could be Long Island Sound, but I'm too lazy to look it up.) Where it's led him is the place I hoped it would go: The bank lobby where the capitalsts hide their ill-got gains from the people whose labor produces them.

Good choice for a read in the present political climate.