EMPTY VESSEL

The weight of the world, carried by one lowly barge.

“Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.” Gustave Flaubert’s astute observation applies well to Kumekawa’s fascinating study of what might be perceived as a banal subject not worthy of our attention: a hulking barge. In 2020 the Harvard historian learned that “a simple ninety-four-meter-long flat-bottomed hull” had been moored on New York’s East River in the 1990s. Upon it sat five stories of modified shipping containers—it served as a floating jail. Curious to know more, Kumekawa found that the vessel had a complicated history that reflected, as he writes, “the abstract forces that have transformed our world over the past forty years.” It was built as the Balder Scapa in Sweden in 1979. Owned by a Norwegian tycoon, its first mission was as a transport barge, towed to Scotland with the “madcap idea” of dredging up steel from World War I warships that Germans sank rather than turn over to the British. That venture fizzled, and the barge was repurposed as a “floatel” to house North Sea offshore oil drillers. The Falklands War got in the way of that plan. In need of housing for troops in the South Atlantic, Margaret Thatcher’s government leased the barge in 1983. “Luxurious they were not,” one pilot said of the accommodations. The vessel’s next stop: Germany, for factory workers building the VW Beetle. And then it was off to New York as a jail, followed by time in England serving the same purpose. In 2010 it was towed to Nigeria for offshore oil workers. 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.

A stellar account of a complex offshore world, as seen through the tangled history of a humble barge.