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You may think you have a pretty good idea of the world map, but Atossa Araxia Abrahamian explains how special economic zones, tax havens, and free ports are carving up the planet for the highest bidders – and leaving millions of people worse off.

“The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World” (Riverhead Books) makes a complex financial and legal subject clear, exciting … and deeply troubling.

Read an excerpt below.

“The Hidden Globe” by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

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We tend to think of ourselves as citizens, or at least residents, of a nation.

After all, the lessons most of us encountered in school included a map of the world divided by lines into countries. Each country, we learned, has a government; and each government rules over its land and its things and its people. The idea of one land, one law, one people, and one government is dominant, powerful, and often accurate. It forms the basis for much of national and international law.

The hidden globe is a kind of transfiguration of this map, an accretion of cracks and concessions, suspensions and abstractions, carve-outs and free zones, and other places without nationality in the conventional sense, stretching from the ocean floor to outer space. The hidden globe is a mercenary world order in which the power to make and shape law is bought, sold, hacked, reshaped, deterritorialized, reterritorialized, transplanted, and reimagined. It is state power catapulted beyond a state’s borders. It is also a state’s selective abdication of certain powers within its remit: enclaves filled not by lawlessness but by different, weirder laws.

The concept of the loophole originated in the seventeenth century to describe the small vertical slits in a castle wall through which archers could fire without risking enemy exposure. Its modern meaning has not changed all that much, only the archers are lawyers, consultants, and accountants—and the fortress, the state itself.

The desire to carve out exceptions is not new: communities have always set places apart for the purpose of contemplation, ritual, and worship. The Celts called these “thin places,” where the distance between heaven and earth was said to be shorter.

Today, our elsewheres and nowheres aren’t places of offerings, but places of evasion. They remind us of the newness of our world of bordered, independent states—a mold whose contents began to set only after decolonization—and its vulnerability to more powerful forces.

Capitalists, forever pursuing profit, regard liminal and offshore jurisdictions as frontiers. This book is as much about these modern frontiersmen as it is about their battlegrounds. But theirs is no freewheeling regime of open borders. While the existence of the hidden globe might appear to challenge the myth of the meaningful, unified nation, the nation is too sticky and politically expedient a concept to do away with entirely. In fact, the hidden globe can empower the most xenophobic and exclusionary nationalism. And these policies are not just the domain of the political right. Whether Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, the regimes behind them aim to bring the right people in and keep the wrong ones out.

By enabling nationalist immigration policies, the hidden globe thus circumscribes the lives of the world’s most disenfranchised people: there are detainees languishing in offshore prisons in the Caribbean and the Pacific, impoverished workers processing goods for export in duty-free industrial zones across the Global South, sailors and asylum seekers stuck on vessels they cannot leave for lack of papers. When a person can’t stay home and is unwanted abroad, they might end up in a third space: neither here nor there. Seeing these spaces for what they are changed the way I saw the world, and I think it will change the way you see it too.

From “The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World” by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. Copyright © 2024 by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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