Empty Vessel

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025 SO FAR

“This elegant and enlightening book is an impressive feat . . . Joins a growing shelf of books about the new forms that globalization is taking, including Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s The Hidden Globe and Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism . . . Kumekawa has written a book about a boat, but he wants us to bear in mind the human beings it carried.” —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review

“Lucid and engaging. . . . What multitudes a ship can contain! . . . 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. . . . For all of its freewheeling abstractions, ‘offshore’ is a peopled, physical place . . . and Empty Vessel contributes tremendously to our growing understanding of this universe.” —Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, The Nation

“[A] colorful history . . . Dion Graham’s outsized dramatic talent and attention to nuance are put to good use with this excellent writing. Carefully adapting his beautiful vocal range to the energy in each word, phrase, and line of thought, Graham provides a layer of impact and meaning that make the author’s historical storytelling come alive.” —AudioFile (“Earphones Award Winner”)

“A novel approach, tracing the ebbs and flow of global commerce through the prism of an unlikely subject. . . . The barge’s varied history is proof of its adaptability; it is always one journey away from reinvention.” —Enda Curran, Bloomberg

“This clever micro-history tracks the voyage of two barges through the roiling economic changes of the past half century. . . . Along the way, Kumekawa brings readers on excursions into the collapse of Sweden’s shipbuilding industry, the rise of automation at Volkswagen, and the emergence of the Bahamas as a tax haven.” —The New Yorker

“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

“A thrilling, meticulous and wondrously original journey, told with a flair and reverence for detail that captures all the joys, travails and horrors of life across time, place and water. A fabulous book.” —Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

“Now that the neoliberal order might move into the rearview mirror, its contours become much clearer. Ian Kumekawa is an excellent guide to this half a century moment in the history of capitalism. By focusing on something small and very local he allows us to see something big and very global: the forging of new inequalities, the retooling of global economic hierarchies, the refashioning of trade and industry, the feverish burning of fossil fuels and the violence and coercions embedded into the neoliberal order supervised by a powerful but recast state. The many-headed hydra of neoliberalism has found its chronicler.” —Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton

“The Vessel is an ingenious, marvelous book. Ian Kumekawa has captured the big economic stories of the past half-century in the perambulations of a single ship. His Vessel drifts across the globe from one major upheaval to the next, a floating, steel witness to extraction, mass production, deindustrialization, incarceration, and war. The result is a high seas picaresque through the systems that tie the modern world together.” —Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise

“A gripping tale—of a floating prison, the worlds of global and offshore capital in which such ships are moored, and the maritime and legal infrastructures that keep such worlds afloat, even amidst the tidal waves of economic and ecological disaster.” —Surabhi Ranganathan, Professor of International Law, University of Cambridge

“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

“Kumekawa brilliantly traces the history of one vessel to make the historical forces of globalization concrete. A riveting and important read that shows the strange ties between tax havens and trade, prisons and ports. Offshore is more than a concept; it is a place. Kumekawa is the ideal guide to that place and its complicated inner workings.” —Heidi Tworek, Professor of History and Public Policy and Canada Research Chair, University of British Columbia

“When the world went on lockdown, Ian Kumekawa took a different tack, tracking a single barge through its journey across the planet. What he discovers is the hidden material life and labor that make the global economy possible. A brilliant, unforgettable tale of our modern times.” —Eric Klinenberg, author of 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed

“Ian Kumekawa’s Empty Vessel, both the book and the accommodation container ship whose checkered history it unfolds, brilliantly illuminates the workings of a global offshore economy that would prefer to remain in the shadows, lingering on the margins of the law, thriving on secrecy, sleight of hand and tax avoidance. By following in the vessels’ wake Kumekawa’s riveting story reveals not just its physical use and functions—as accommodation for British troops, New York prisoners, oil workers, asylum seekers—but explains how the Vessel became an exemplary object caught up in global skeins/schemes of capital and finance.” —John Brewer, Professor Emeritus, Caltech Division of Humanities and Social Sciences

“A compelling voyage in and of itself, taking the reader on a journey around the global economy that illuminates the systemic blind spots of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century global economy. A trip on a barge that takes you further than you imagined.” —Kojo Koram, author of Uncommon Wealth

“If you’ve ever struggled to understand what terms like “globalisation” or “financialistion” actually mean, Empty Vessel is the book for you. Kumekawa combines in depth research with powerful storytelling to show the reader, in concrete terms, how modern capitalism really works—and how it has changed over the last several decades.” —Grace Blakeley, author of Vulture Capitalism

“Incisive . . . A cleverly conceived appraisal of the international economy’s troubled recent history.” —Publishers Weekly

“The Vessel is a character, and Kumekawa gives it a voice through first-hand accounts by the people who built, worked, and were incarcerated on it. . . . [He] uses these barges and their voyages as metaphors in a bigger tale of material processes required in global economics, [offering] unique insights on regions from the Caribbean to Africa and how these barges were deployed in strategic and interesting ways.” —Jennifer Adams, Booklist

“A stellar account of a complex offshore world, as seen through the tangled history of a humble barge. . . . Throughout his epic telling, Kumekawa weaves in lucid and eye-opening explanations of the murky worlds of tax havens and loose regulations. The barge is at the heart of it all. The vessel has ‘no motor, no keel, no rudder,’ he writes, but his book has undeniable drive.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“A sophisticated allegory for the trend toward a less regulated, more homogeneous world . . . The fate of an object over decades can reveal truths about human activity.” —Library Journal

“[Empty Vessel] beckons us aboard a humble container barge that has never had an engine nor even a rudder, but nonetheless grants a unique perspective on the world economy and ‘the abstract forces thathave transformed our world over the past forty years.'” —Abram Brown, The Information