Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge

This incisive study from Kumekawa (The First Serious Optimist), an economic history professor at Harvard University, uses an oceangoing barge as a window onto the global economy. The barge, which changed hands and names so many times Kumekawa refers to it simply as “the Vessel,” was constructed in 1979 in a Swedish shipyard that was soon bankrupted by lower-wage competition in South Korea and Taiwan. As offshore oil drilling boomed in the early 1980s, the barge housed rig workers in “slightly modified standard shipping containers.” From 1989 to 1994, the vessel was moored in Manhattan to help accommodate New York City’s swelling prison population, a development Kumekawa uses to critique the war on drugs and the Reagan administration’s shrinking of the welfare state. A final assignment housing workers in Nigeria’s offshore oil industry illustrates the corruption and volatility endemic to the petroleum sector. Kumekawa also looks in on the vessel’s sister ship, whose registration under a flag of convenience allowed its Indian owner to abandon the barge and its crew in Namibia without paying them in 2018. Kumekawa presents the vessel as a grim symbol of a global capitalism that drifts wherever labor is cheapest, taxes lowest, and regulations weakest. The result is a cleverly conceived appraisal of the international economy’s troubled recent history. Photos. Agent: Katherine Flynn, Calligraph Lit. (May)