Empty Vessel

The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge

By: Ian Kumekawa

Length: 10 hrs

Publisher's summary

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 Scapa: 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 embody: 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.

©2025 Ian Kumekawa (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"In the astonishing trajectory of a humble barge, Empty Vessel delivers an ambitious history of the global economy, linking everything from oil-drilling and offshore finance to military deployments and mass incarceration. I’ve rarely read a book that so deftly entwines a single, accessible story with the broad forces of globalization. A stunningly original history, as phenomenally well-researched as it is eloquently told." –-Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch

"Ian Kumekawa's tale of the Barge—a floating dormitory built in Sweden for a Norwegian financier, towed successively to the South Atlantic, to Germany, to Manhattan's East River, to Britain's southern coast, and to Nigeria, housing in turn soldiers, drug addicts, prisoners, and migrant workers; continually the object of contending legal regimes and offshore financial opportunities—is an imaginative and beautifully written allegory of the decades of globalization and the fugitive wealth it supported. What an eye-opening read!" —Charles S. Maier, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History, Emeritus, Harvard University

“Empty Vessel is a captivating story—I read it like a detective novel— and at the same time a profound contribution to the history of economic, financial and material life in the contemporary globalized world.” —Emma Rothschild, Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History, Harvard University