Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s–1970s

Abstract

This article traces the emergence of an archipelago-like landscape of distinct legal and economic spaces throughout the long midcentury. Consisting of tax havens, offshore financial markets, flags of convenience, and economic free zones, this archipelago allowed free-market capitalism to flourish on the sidelines of a world increasingly dominated by more sizable and interventionist nation-states. It argues that certain characteristics of the rise of free-market capitalism since the 1970s and 1980s were previously practiced in the offshore archipelago, only to move back to Europe and North America with the rise of neoliberalism.

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