Ships are a trip. Virtually everything we use or consume, from Apple computers to Chiquita bananas, makes its way to us by sea. Much of what we think of as Western civ was borne on a boat: imperialism, of course, but also epic poetry (The Odyssey), modernist literature (Moby-Dick), blockbuster cinema (Titanic), and even questionable reality TV (Below Deck, anyone?). When it comes to the rest of the world, ships are just as central:

What would our world look like without ancient Egyptian shipbuilders, Polynesian voyagers, Japanese traders, and Somali merchants? Forget globalization: Would we even have a globe?

In his bizarre book Land and Sea, the German political theorist Carl Schmitt went so far as to assert that all of human history was defined by “the battle of sea powers against land powers and of land powers against sea powers.” (Schmitt was firmly on the side of the landlubbers.) There is something not entirely human about the maritime realm. Boats are of our world and yet outside it; they are born on land but then spend their lives essentially cast away.

To board a ship has always required a leap of faith: a willingness to face the elements, confront pirates, or drift off course, never to return. Sea voyages also challenge our very sense of physics. The world’s largest cruise ship, Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, is made of steel beams and weighs a quarter-million tons—and yet somehow, it floats. We take these gravitational marvels for granted. These days, ships are homes and prisons, hotels and offices, lavish vacation venues and toxic industrial sites, hospitals and casinos and even, when abandoned, ghosts. Still, a deck is not to be confused with solid ground. It is a space, but one that’s rarely in the same place. That makes it a site of some epistemological consternation. Where is it? What is it? To which nation does it really belong?

In Empty Vessel, Ian Kumekawa explores this conundrum through the life and times of a barge called Jascon 27 (née Balder Scapa). 
The ship—“a dumb pontoon without voice, personality or drive” that Kumekawa dubs “the Vessel”—has nonetheless had a complicated life: It was commissioned by a Norwegian company in 1978 and built in a state-owned Swedish shipyard the following year. Designed as a transport barge, then sold to another firm and kitted out with cabins to house offshore oil workers, the Vessel has traversed the globe ever since and, at each stop, made small but substantial contributions to the ongoing expansion of the offshore economy.

By narrating the Vessel’s journey from port to port, Kumekawa reminds us how dependent on the maritime world the global economy really is, from the production of energy to the movement of people. But what’s new here are his sharp observations about the deterritorialized spaces the ship inhabits, and how these arenas have evolved over time. As the Vessel moved farther into the offshore world, the offshore world itself became deeper, darker, and more all-consuming.

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Kumekawa begins with the ship’s prehistory: the decisions and commissions that led to its being built. But the Vessel’s first long voyage was to the South Atlantic, where it was sent to aid in England’s recapture of the Falkland Islands in 1982. A battleship the Vessel was not: Without an engine of its own, it had to be hauled there on top of another, bigger boat (the humiliation!). Once arrived, it served as a “floatel” for soldiers deployed in the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s counteroffensive. Such was its storied role in this peculiar conflagration that it made it onto a commemorative postage stamp issued in 1987.

But what looked like a patriotic feat of the British state relied in equal measure on commercial, even mercenary interests. For all the military bluster that surrounded it, the Vessel was never actually under the jurisdiction of the British government: It was registered in the tax-free, judicially independent Channel Islands by a holding company that listed as its address a hotel on the island of Sark, part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey.

So began the Vessel’s strange career. After the short Falklands War, it was soon given a new mission: to house auto workers at a Volkswagen plant in Emden, West Germany. The workers’ stay was always supposed to be temporary—they’d been recruited from other cities to participate in a training session that would, ironically, aid in automating more of the company’s operations—and during the summer of 1988, the Vessel accommodated some 500 people in “cramped” and “stuffy” conditions.

By the early 1990s, the Vessel had changed course again. From holding soldiers and deindustrialized factory workers, it now became a prison ship. It was tugged all the way to New York City, where the Department of Corrections used it as floating housing, an aquatic counterpart to Rikers Island, before it headed across the ocean again to serve as yet another jail—this time off the coast of Portland, England.

In 2010, the Vessel was given one final assignment. Transported to a free trade zone for oil and gas in Nigerian waters, it finally fulfilled its intended function: It housed men who lived and worked at sea servicing the fossil fuel industry.

During these tumultuous times, the Vessel’s ownership changed as often as its purpose and location. Its masters included a Norwegian shell company, a British shipping firm, the City of New York, the British government, and subsidiaries of a Nigerian company founded by a Dutch expat. Its flags—and, by extension, the laws on board the vessel—rarely aligned with its physical location, its ownership, or even its assigned mission. Most, like the Bahamian colors, were flags of convenience, leased by countries with the goal of reducing a shipowner’s tax and regulatory burden. This created some absurd scenarios: among them, allowing New York City “to literally offshore its prisoners. With its Bahamian flag and its signage still in Swedish, the Vessel brought the offshore world to New York, and global capitalism to local mass incarceration.”

The Vessel’s metamorphoses are notable in and of themselves: What multitudes a ship can contain! But Kumekawa is more interested in what this ship can teach us about the offshore world and, by extension, everywhere else as well. In this respect, what links the Vessel’s many gigs and sinecures is not just the ship itself, or its half-century of residents, but the geopolitical forces that drove it to move and change in the first place.

The Vessel’s deployment to the Falklands, for instance, is framed as symptomatic not only of a growing British militarism and nationalism but also of Thatcher’s fealty to the free market and her lust for gutting the welfare state in the anxious hangover years of decolonization. “The empire might have won the war, but it would need private foreign assistance in guaranteeing the peace,” Kumekawa writes. “Such was the uneasy bargain of Margaret Thatcher’s government: globalism and nationalism, a growing state security apparatus, and a privatized economic sphere.”

The Vessel’s later function as a dorm for Volkswagen workers is set against the backdrop of deindustrialization in Germany. In New York’s East River, the Vessel becomes a tool of the carceral state amid “broken windows” policing and the escalating War on Drugs. In a particularly sharp section, Kumekawa compares New York’s use of the prison barge to the city’s deregulation of Wall Street through rules-exempt International Banking Facilities, or free zones for finance. The parallels, he notes, are “striking”: Both were imported from abroad as “artifacts of a shadowy offshore world,” remained outside the control of local authorities, and were championed as solutions to the city’s fiscal crisis.

Back in England, the prison ship was met with understandable suspicion: The residents of Portland dismissed it as an American import and a stain on their coastal town. Yet the Vessel was ultimately embraced as a job creator in the context of Third Way politics, as well as the site of a not-so-terrible correctional facility (even the people incarcerated there spoke more or less fondly of the food and accommodations). When the Vessel finally left Portland, the townspeople, once skeptical, found that they were sad to see it go.

Kumekawa could have written a book that narrates the economic upheavals and political isms of the late 20th century through his ship’s journey around the world. And because the ship is such a strong character, he would have pulled it off. Fortunately, though, Empty Vessel pushes the narrative further: Rather than merely describing the effects of neoliberal policies on nations and their people, Kumekawa inverts the story and makes it about the interstices occupied, physically and legally, by the Vessel. In fact, the most insightful parts of this book do not take place on the ground or even at sea but in venues that are more or less placeless: in arbitration tribunals, tax havens, free zones, and letterboxes where the ship’s physical existence is itself secondary to its corporate one.

In the late 1970s, for instance, the Vessel did double duty as a (physical) barge and a (legal) corporation. This was a ruse: After the Norwegian government set about protecting its shipbuilding industry by allowing taxpayers to write off their investments in the sector, a clever business owner used the loophole to cloak dozens of ships in LLCs that could help over 1,500 “partners”—dentists, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals—avoid their country’s 75.4 percent tax rate.

The barge’s subsequent legal and commercial entanglements over the course of its useful life likewise shine a light on the complex interplay between the abstract and the material: a pas de deux that animates not only the world of ships but the entire global economy. The Vessel, Kumekawa writes, exists “both as an abstracted artifact of global capitalism and also as a concrete object to be used for local ends.” That’s because its value stems not from its heft or craftsmanship but from its ability to contain—oil, cargo, bodies—and also to be (selectively) contained: by shell companies, court orders, national laws, and international agreements.

There are many ways to understand the political and economic movements of a globalized age, but ships, it turns out, are an ideal, well, vessel for this line of inquiry. Unlike bearer bonds or orange juice futures, there is no eliding the fact that a ship is a real thing, as opposed to a relationship between parties or a bet on the future. They have a feel, a smell, a presence. Ships, as I learned in my own research, also have dedicated fan clubs. What’s more, every vessel of a certain size is given a number by the International Maritime Organization, which means that it is almost endlessly traceable. This is in stark contrast to other financial assets, which can seemingly disappear into the ether with the right combination of accounting acrobatics and secrecy jurisdictions. Ships, too, can disappear into specialized legal fictions, but the charade can only go so far. When you’re face-to-face with one, they’re impossible to ignore.

All of this baggage—the fans, the journeys, the barnacles—also makes for great stories, and I couldn’t help but wish Kumekawa had told us a bit more about not just the Vessel but the people who inhabited it. There’s an element of voyeurism in learning about people’s onboard adventures, but the absurdities of global capitalism are all the more apparent when you contrast its sterile, dismembered legal scaffolding with the living, breathing, feeling beings that make it run.

We encounter a few of these characters in Empty Vessel’s standout moments, but for the most part, when Kumekawa does deal with humans, it is those of another class: the managers who move the ship from one place to another. This is no bad thing—these are, after all, the figures who animate the offshore world. But if this excellent book missed one opportunity, it was to go deeper belowdecks and let the seafarers have their say.

Over the past decade, a critical mass of research and writing on the underbelly of globalization has coalesced into an area of inquiry that we might call “offshore studies.” Much of it is being written in history, geography, sociology, and anthropology departments, but this work has also been supplemented by economists quantifying the repercussions of financial secrecy, data journalists turning terabytes of leaked records into stories and searchable repositories, and reporters (present company included) writing the first drafts of these histories.

Kumekawa’s book is a creature of offshore studies, albeit liberated from some of the field’s clunky prose and methodological jargon. A historian by training, Kumekawa provides a lengthy bibliography and plenty of receipts, but like the popular mass-market microhistories that preceded it(half of which were apparently written by Mark Kurlansky), Empty Vessel is lucid and engaging. Its structure allows the author some historical digressions—into, say, deindustrialization or the oil markets or the German export economy—but the book also has a clear narrative, a central character, a beginning and an end (though its chronology is a weakness: The book jumps back and forth to the point that it can be hard to follow). Kumekawa’s decision to also write about the Vessel’s worthy counterpart, which he calls “the Sister Vessel,” tends to complicate his mission to explain the global economy through just one barge. But most of his detours help him achieve one of the larger ambitions of his book: illuminating how the offshore economy depends on both world-historical forces and local contingencies, which together produce a universe of their own. “The offshore world, accessible from Oslo, New York, Portland, Onne and Nassau, has not just brought such disparate places closer together,” Kumekawa writes, but “has made them fundamentally more alike, hollowing them out in the process.”

“Offshore,” as Kumekawa reminds us, in opposition to unexceptional, “onshore” territory. It is a vast archipelago of jurisdictions stretching from the City of London to the islands of Vanuatu; a firmament of loopholes, concessions, and carve-outs as small as a diplomatic pouch and as vast as outer space. The Vessel, as a denizen of this universe, is “caught between local and global systems, local and global power structures”—physically removed yet subject to the whims and desires of terrestrial corporations, nation-states, and individuals alike.

But for all of its freewheeling abstractions, as Kumekawa reminds us, “offshore” is a peopled, physical place—one with “norms and customs, its own languages, logics and boundaries”—and Empty Vessel contributes tremendously to our growing understanding of 
this universe.