No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 September 2024
Quinn Slobodian has established himself as a leading historian of neoliberalism. Crack-Up Capitalism continues where his Globalists left off, but shifts focus from visions of global ordering to the fragmentation of the world into special economic zones (SEZs). In Slobodian’s provocative analysis, SEZs become a late neoliberal solution to the entrenched problem of democracy at the nation-state level. We follow Slobodian into the zone, thinking with him about the spatial dimensions of contemporary political economy. Although we problematize the disjuncture between Crack-Up Capitalism’s group biography of market radicals and its analysis of zones as a global economic reality, our intent is not to critique Slobodian, but to use his new book as a jumping off point to foreground other possible frames for understanding the zone: a longue durée historical outlook that can help de-exceptionalize the zone as a phenomenon of late neoliberalism, a focus on the internal diversity and political possibility of the zone form, and an emphasis on the causal link between the recent proliferation of zones and the ascendance of export-oriented industrialization as a global development paradigm.
The maps and data visualizations in this essay (and in the appendix of maps) were created by the cartographer Isabelle Lewis and by Matthew W. Norris, Vice President, Enterprise Software and Analytics, Art Institute of Chicago. They are based on 2021 data provided by the Adrianople Group, www.adrianoplegroup.com, which has curated the most accurate available (though not complete) global snapshot of special economic zones. An interactive map is available online at www.openzonemap.com. We wish to thank the Adrianople Group for sharing their data with us and James Forster for his very kind help through the process. Finally, we thank Quinn Slobodian for his generosity and encouragement, and Sven Beckert, Mattias Fibiger, Julius Kirshner, Meg Rithmire, and Charlotte Robertson for reading drafts of this essay.
1 For an incisive take on the breakup of this framework, see Pankaj Mishra, “Grand Illusions,” New York Review of Books 67, no. 18 (Nov. 2020): 31–32.
2 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 5, 7, and passim.
3 Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA, 2018), on which see, among others, the review by Sophus A. Reinert in Business History Review 93, no. 3 (Autumn 2019): 613–619. Slobodian’s analysis of neoliberalism has developed within a wider scholarly milieu that has highlighted the figures who created and the ideas that formed and were disseminated by the Mont Pelerin Society. It would be impossible to do justice to this literature here, but Slobodian’s local context can be cautiously and partially traced across four important edited volumes: Neoliberal Hegemony: A Global Critique, ed. Dieter Plehwe, Bernhard Walpen, and Gisela Neunhöffer (London, 2006); The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA, 2009, rev. 2015); Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, ed. Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian, and Philip Mirowski (London, 2020); and Market Civilizations: Neoliberals East and South, ed. Quinn Slobodian and Dieter Plehwe (Brooklyn, 2022).
4 For an excellent overview, see the studies in Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of America’s Most Powerful Economics Program, ed. Philip Mirowski, Robert Van Horn, and Thomas A. Stapleford (Cambridge, UK, 2011). Bernard Harcourt has also developed a stunning historical and theoretical critique of neoliberalism, with a special focus on its Chicago School variety, in Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing (Cambridge, MA, 2001), The Illusion of Free Markets (Cambridge, MA, 2010), and other works.
5 Slobodian, Globalists, 10–11, 138.
6 This was one of the core concerns of Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 155 and passim, but see already Thorstein Veblen, “The Passing of National Frontiers [1918],” in Essays in Our Changing Order, ed. Leon Ardzooni (New York, 1934), 387–389. For perspectives, see also Sophus A. Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs: Commercial Society and Political Economy in Enlightenment Italy (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 5, 14, 249, 260, 317–319, 383.
7 Slobodian, Globalists, 2, 145.
8 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 23.
9 Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City, ed. Mary Ann O’Donnell, Winnie Wong, and Jonathan Bach (Chicago, 2017).
10 Meg Rithmire, Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia (Oxford, 2023), 18–19; Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, 2006), 18–19, 96–118; Jean Chun Oi, Rural China Takes Off: Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform (Berkeley, 1999); Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State (Cambridge, UK, 2008). On the strengths and limitations of thinking of SEZs as “Petri dishes for economic policies,” see Lotta Moberg, The Political Economy of Special Economic Zones (London, 2017), 72.
11 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 199.
12 Slobodian, 183.
13 Slobodian, 218. For very convincing recent cases against consulting firms, see Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm (New York, 2022), and Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington, The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies (New York, 2023).
14 T.S. Eliot, The Rock: A Pageant Play (New York, 1934), 7.
15 Quoted in Mazzucato and Collington, The Big Con, 92.
16 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 42–43 and passim.
17 Slobodian, 106.
18 Slobodian, 221. See, for a similar argument, Angus Cameron and Ronen Palan, The Imagined Economies of Globalization (London, 2004), 105, 109.
19 Omolade Adunbi, Enclaves of Exception: Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria (Bloomington, 2022), 190.
20 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 236.
21 Slobodian, 217, but see also 95 and 100.
22 S. Ananthanarayanan, “New Mechanisms of Imperialism in India: The Special Economic Zones,” Socialism and Democracy, 22, (2008): 35–60. See also, for an excellent introduction to the problem, Laura Alfaro and Lakshmi Iyer, “Special Economic Zones in India: Public Purpose and Private Property (A),” Harvard Business School Case 709-027, revised Oct. 2012, followed by Laura Alfaro, Lakshmi Iyer, and Namrata Arora, “Tata Motors in Singur: Public Purpose and Private Property (B),” Harvard Business School Case 709-029, revised Oct. 2012, and Laura Alfaro, Lakshmi Iyer, and Rachna Tahilyani, “Land Acquisition in India: Public Purpose and Private Property (C),” Harvard Business School Supplement 714-023, revised May 2015.
23 For context, see the essays in Power, Policy, and Protest: The Politics of India’s Special Economic Zones, ed. Rob Jenkins, Loraine Kennedy, and Partha Mukhopadhyay (Oxford, 2014).
24 Quoted in Rohini Mohan, “Modi’s Seized Earth Campaign,” Foreign Policy, 26 May 2015.
25 Ronen Palan, The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires (Ithaca, 2003), 70.
26 Carlo Ginzburg, in one of his most brilliant essays, “Family Resemblances and Family Trees: Two Cognitive Metaphors,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Spring 2004): 537–556, suggests the importance of studying the fuzzy edges.
27 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 1. We have briefly touched on Thiel’s thought before, in Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert, “Leviathan and Kraken: States, Corporations, and Political Economy,” History and Theory 59, no. 2 (2020): 183–184, where we also venture the Norwegian sea monster called the Kraken as a symbol of the tentacular economic actors and forces bringing about the increasing disintegration of the nation-state as an ideal type.
28 Thomas More, A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, volume 12, ed. Louis L. Martz and Frank Manley (New Haven, 1976), 155, ll.11–12 (spelling modernized). This snippet from More has been very widely quoted, perhaps most famously as one of two epigrams at the start of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters (London, 1942).
29 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 191.
30 Slobodian, 128.
31 See, for one recent example, Rosie Gray, “How Bronze Age Pervert Built an Online Following and Injected Anti-Democracy, Pro-Men Ideas into the GOP,” Politico, 16 July 2023, accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/16/bronze-age-pervert-masculinity-00105427. QAnon is also often said to include LARPing elements; see Daniël de Zeeuw and Alex Gekker, “A God-Tier LARP? Qanon as Conspiracy Fictioning,” Social Media + Society, 9, issue 1 (Jan.–Mar. 2023), accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231157300; De Zeeuw and Marc Tuters, “‘Teh Internet is Serious Business’: On the Deep Vernacular Web and Its Discontents,” Cultural Politics 16, no. 2 (2020): 214–232.
32 Best known is the moral panic that surrounded Dungeons & Dragons, a “tabletop roleplaying game” rather than a LARP, in the US in the mid-1980s; see Joseph P. Laycock, Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds (Berkeley, 2015). The contemporary cultural significance of the roleplaying game is hard to quantify or to overestimate. Jon Peterson’s work is essential, especially the monumental Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-Playing Games (San Diego, 2012), but also The Elusive Shift: How Roleplaying Games Forged Their Identity (Cambridge, MA, 2020).
33 Richard E. Dansky, Mind’s Eye Theatre: Laws of the Night: Rules for Playing Vampires (Stone Mountain, GA, 1996), 14. LARPing has come a long way since. The cutting-edge of LARPing as a (usually non-profit) collaborative art form is found in the so-called “Nordic Larp” style pioneered in Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden: see the essays in States of Play: Nordic Larp Around the World, ed. Juhana Petterson (Tampere, Finland, 2012).
34 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 128.
35 Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007), passim but especially 473–504.
36 David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” 21–82, in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (New York, 1997), 68.
37 Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 433.
38 On the development of venture capitalism, see Tom Nicholas, VC: An American History, (Cambridge, MA, 2019).
39 Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston, 1997).
40 Chris Dixon, “The next big thing will start out looking like a toy,” blog post, 3 Jan. 2010, accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-looking-like-a-toy.
41 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 121–123, 128, 214.
42 Slobodian, 15.
43 Roberto Calasso, L’innominabile attuale (Milan, 2017).
44 Fredona and Reinert, “Leviathan and Kraken,” 177, and especially note 38; Sophus A. Reinert, “Rivalry: Greatness in Early Modern Political Economy,” in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and its Empire, ed. Phil Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford, 2014), 348–370; Reinert, Academy of Fisticuffs, 329 note 19.
45 Concessions still take on decidedly state-like forms: for one example, see Sophus A. Reinert, Sarah Nam, Sisi Pan, and Eric Werker, “ArcelorMittal and the Ebola Outbreak in Liberia,” Harvard Business School Case 9-718-029, revised Mar. 2018; and, for a similar historical case, Marcelo Bucheli, Bananas and Business: The United Fruit Company in Colombia, 1899–2000 (New York, 2005), followed by Geoffrey Jones and Marcelo Bucheli, “The Octopus and the Generals: The United Fruit Company in Guatemala,” Harvard Business School Case 805-146, revised Oct. 2022.
46 On Yarvin’s imperial ambitions, see Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 185. On the Dutch East India Company, see Sophus A. Reinert and Robert Fredona, “The Dutch East India Company (VOC),” Harvard Business School Case 732-002, revised 2022. On the theme of corporate sovereignty, see also Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford, 2012), and Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism (Cambridge, MA, 2023), as well as Andrew Phillips and J.C. Sharman, Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World (Princeton, 2020), Steven Press, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa (Cambridge, MA, 2017), and Michel Gobat, Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America (Cambridge, MA, 2018).
47 Mencius Moldbug, “A Formalist Manifesto,” 24 Apr. 2007, accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted.
48 We have in mind here the tulpa as it has entered the Western imagination, especially through the spiritualist-explorer Alexandra David-Néel’s Magic and Mystery in Tibet (London, 1931): see Natasha L. Mikles and Joseph P. Laycock, “Tracking the Tulpa: Exploring the ‘Tibetan’ Origins of a Contemporary Paranormal Idea,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 19, no. 1 (2015): 87–97. For a memorable exploration of the tulpa in the context of one of the gated communities so central to Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism, see The X-Files episode “Arcadia,” season 6, episode 15, 1999, written by Daniel Arkin and directed by Michael Watkins.
49 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 7.
50 Slobodian, 223.
51 Slobodian, 239. Lee’s motto was widely disseminated via the short-lived 1971–72 American television series Longstreet. Those seeking its origin and meaning should turn first to Bruce Lee’s handwritten essay “The Tao of Gung Fu: A Study in the Way of the Chinese Martial Art,” 16 May 1962, published in John R. Little’s collection, Bruce Lee: Artist of Life (North Clarendon, VT, 2001), 2–12. Lee quotes, at p. 6, a translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching: “The natural phenomenon which the gung fu man sees as being the closest resemblance to wu wei is water: Nothing is weaker than water,/But when it attacks something hard/Or resistant, then nothing withstands it,/And nothing will alter its way.”
52 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 47.
53 Slobodian, 48.
54 Slobodian, 221; Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to the Decline of Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA, 1970).
55 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 236.
56 Faustine Ngila, “Sam Bankman-Fried Wanted to Buy the Nation of Nauru to Wait Out the World’s End,” Quartz, 21 July 2023, accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://qz.com/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-nauru-court-case-money-laundering-1850662899. On Nauru, see Sophus A. Reinert, Dawn Lau, Courtney Basanovic, and Julie Kheyfets, “Nauru: Paradise Lost,” Harvard Business School Case 719-009, revised 2022.
57 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 77, 162. See also Sarah Scoles, “Forget Earth: In Space, Libertarian Ideas Are Thriving,” Wired, 12 Dec. 2019, accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://www.wired.com/story/forget-earth-in-space-libertarian-ideas-are-thriving/; and Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (New York, 2022).
58 Eytan Tepper, “Structuring the Discourse on the Exploitation of Space Resources: Between Economic and Legal Commons,” Space Policy 49 (2019): 5; Anthony E. Cassimatis, Public International Law (Oxford, 2021), 339. For a prehistory of the Grotius-Selden debate, see Robert Fredona, “Angelo degli Ubaldi and the Gulf of the Venetians: Custom, Commerce, and the Control of the Sea before Grotius,” in New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy, ed. Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert (London, 2018), 29–73.
59 Matthew Weinzierl and Mehak Sarang, “The Commercial Space Age is Here,” Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 12 Feb. 2021, accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://hbr.org/2021/02/the-commercial-space-age-is-here.
60 It is by now a trite but long-standing trope that “Something like an interglobal war would be needed to give any genuine meaning to the trite phrase of human brotherhood,” as Herbert W. Schneider put it in 1960 in Morals for Mankind (The Paul Anthony Brick Lectures) (Columbia, MO, 1960), 50. The 1986–87 comic book series Watchmen (New York, 1986–87), by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, gave this trope a suitably dark twist in the plan of Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias) to save humanity from nuclear war by faking an alien invasion of New York City. Interglobal trade is unlikely to spread human brother- and sisterhood throughout the universe. This is strongly suggested by the rapacious and warlike experience of global trade on earth; Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA, 2011); Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert, “Epilogue,” New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy, 393–395. Although the Enlightenment trope that trade would tame human belligerence still has its die-hard supporters, they were bolder in the 90s. See, for an essential late-90s version, Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York, 1999). At the time the present essay was written, contrary to Friedman’s “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,” two “McDonald’s countries” (Russia and Ukraine) were very notably at war. On earlier commercial legends, including that of peace through trade, see Robert Fredona, review essay of Francesca Trivellato, The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton 2019), in Business History Review 94, no. 3 (Autumn 2020): 637–652. The cosmopolitan myth has survived in many quarters of academia and the media; for a recasting of cosmopolitanism, see Sophus A. Reinert, “Cosmopolis: Empire and Capitalism,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 51, no. 1 (Fall 2018): 19–25.
61 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 199.
62 Slobodian, 207.
63 See Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs, 264–267 and Reinert, “The Origins of the Developmental State: The European Experience,” in The Oxford Handbook of State Capitalism and the Firm, ed. Mike Wright, Geoffrey T. Wood, Alvaro Cuervo-Cazurra, Pei Sun, Ilya Okhmatovskiy, and Anna Grosman (Oxford, 2022), 66–70.
64 “Conley Terminal Foreign Trade Zone,” Massport, accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://www.massport.com/conley-terminal/about-the-port/benefits-of-shipping/foreign-trade-zone.
65 Or, as he dryly puts it, “some kinds of economic freedom depend on political disenfranchisement”: Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 82.
66 Palan, The Offshore World, 112.
67 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York, 1974), 164.
68 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 3.
69 For additional information about the Adrianople Group and their mapping project, see Adrianople Group, “About Us,” accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://www.adrianoplegroup.com/about-us and “Open Zone Map,” accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://www.adrianoplegroup.com/zonemap/about.
70 Adunbi, Enclaves of Exception, 2–3.
71 Corey Tazzara, “Capitalism and the Special Economic Zone, 1590–2014,” in New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy, ed. Reinert and Fredona, 75.
72 Ronen Palan, The Offshore World; Palan, Richard Murphy, and Christian Chavagneux, Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works (Ithaca, 2009); and Gabriel Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago, 2015).
73 Jannick Damgaard, Thomas Elkjaer, and Niels Johannesen, “The Rise of Phantom Investments,” International Monetary Fund, Sept. 2019, accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2019/09/the-rise-of-phantom-FDI-in-tax-havens-damgaard.
74 Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations, 35–36.
75 Nicholas Shaxson, “Tackling Tax Havens,” International Monetary Fund, Sep. 2019, accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2019/09/tackling-global-tax-havens-shaxon.
76 Junior Davis, Milasoa Chérel-Robson, Claudia Roethlisberger, Carlotta Schuster, and Anja Slany, eds., Economic Development in Africa Report 2020: Tackling Illicit Financial Flows for Sustainable Development in Africa (Geneva, 2020), 25.
77 See, for example, Chris Jones, Yama Temouri, Karim Kirollos, and Jun Du, “Tax Havens and Emerging Market Multinationals: The Role of Property Rights Protection and Economic Freedom,” Journal of Business Research vol. 155, Part B (Jan. 2023), accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0148296322008384.
78 ActionAid, How Tax Havens Plunder the Poor (London, 2013), 8, accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://actionaid.org/sites/default/files/how_tax_havens_plunder_the_poor.pdf.
79 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, ed. Fred Block, with an introduction by Joseph E. Stiglitz (Boston, 2001 [original 1944]). On the debate over capitalism and commercial society see, among others, Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs, 11–15 and passim, as well as Michael Sonenscher, Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word (Princeton, 2022).
80 Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs, 327–336.
81 Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets, 242 and passim; Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs, 335–336.
82 Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, “Foire,” in Denis Diderot and Jean Le Ronde d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 28 vols. (Paris, 1751–72), vol. vii, p. 41, on which see Anne Concon, “Foires et marches en France au XCIIIe siècle: definitions fiscales et économie du privilège,” in Fiere e mercati nella integrazione delle economie europee sec. XIII-XVIII, ed. Simonetta Cavachiocchi (Florence, 2001), 289–98; Francesca Trivellato, “La fiera del corallo (Livorno, XVIII e XVIII secolo): Istituzioni e autoregolamento del mercato in etá moderna,” in La pratica dello scambio: Sistemi di fiere, mercanti e città in Europa (1400–1700), ed. Paolo Lanaro (Venice, 2003), 122–123.
83 “Introduction,” The Druk Journal 2, no. 1 (Summer 2016), accessed 12 Dec. 2023, http://drukjournal.bt/bhutan-and-modernity-responding-to-change/; Thibault Serlet, The Future of Zones in the Land of the Thunder Dragon: How SEZs Can Help Revitalize the Economy of Bhutan in the Wake of the Global Pandemic (Roanoke, 2021); Interview with Daphne Yeshi, 25 July 2023; Sophus A. Reinert, Thomas Humphrey, and Benjamin Safran, “Bhutan: Governing for Happiness,” Harvard Business School Case 715-024, revised 2019.
84 Megan Maruschke, Portals of Globalization: Repositioning Mumbai’s Ports and Zones, 1833–2014 (Oldenburg, 2019), 7; Vanessa Ogle, “Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s–1970s,” American Historical Review 122, no. 5 (2017): 1431–1458.
85 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 194–196.
86 Slobodian, 35, quoting Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (New York, 2010), 290.
87 Saskia Sassen, “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 219.
88 Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 78.
89 For relevant perspectives, see, among many others, William G. Tyler, “Growth and Export Expansion in Developing Countries: Some Empirical Evidence,” Journal of Development Economics 9, no. 1 (1981): 121–130; Erik S. Reinert, How Rich Countries Got Rich … And Why Poor Countries Stay Poor (New York, 2008); Thomas I. Palley, “The Rise and Fall of Export-Led Growth,” Investigación económica 71, no. 280 (2012): 141–161.
90 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 7.
91 Slobodian, 85; Lotta Moberg, The Political Economy of Special Economic Zones: Concentrating Economic Development (London, 2017), 163; Cameron and Palan, Imagined Economies, 98; Palan, Offshore World, 119–120.
92 The essays in Corey Tazzara and Koen Stapelbroek, eds., The Global History of the Free Port, a special issue of Global Intellectual History 8, no. 6 (2023), will set a new standard for thinking about the phenomenon from the late sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
93 Astrid Möller, Naukratis: Trade in Archaic Greece (Oxford, 2000).
94 Moses I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley, 1997 [original 1970]), 130.
95 Corey Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno and the Transformation of the Mediterranean World, 1574–1790 (Oxford, 2017).
96 For such readings, see the essays in Roman Port Societies: The Evidence of Inscriptions, ed. Pascal Arnaud and Simon Keay (Cambridge, UK, 2020), particularly Sabine Panzram, “Living Like a Cosmopolitan? On Roman Port Societies in the Western World,” 233–234.
97 Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 3 vols. (New York, 1979), vol. ii, 528.
98 Lee, “The Tao of Gung Fu,” 6.
99 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 129. On the principles of Burning Man, see “The 10 Principles of Burning Man,” Burning Man Project, accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/09/grover-norquist-goes-to-burning-man.html. For a variety of perspectives on the Burning Man festival, see the essays in Lee Gilmore and Mark Van Proyen, eds., AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man (Albuquerque, 2005).
100 Quoted in Kevin Roose, “Grover Norquist Goes to Burning Man,” New York Magazine, 1 Sept. 2014, accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/09/grover-norquist-goes-to-burning-man.html.
101 Interview conducted with Jason on 13 Sep. 2023. “Jason” is a pseudonym used to protect the interview subject’s privacy. Although volunteers provide most essential services at the festival, it should be noted that the site in the Black Rock Desert resides on federal government land and is under the primary jurisdiction of the US Bureau of Land Management. Of BLM personnel, Jason declared, “you don’t see them ever but the rumor is that they are undercover.” On the organization and planning of Burning Man, see Katherine K. Chen, Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event (Chicago, 2009).
102 Decommodification and gifting have not eliminated innovation or competition, a point stressed by Jason, and in Nick Bilton, “A Line Is Drawn in the Desert: At Burning Man, the Tech Elite One-Up One Another,” New York Times, 20 Aug. 2014, accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/fashion/at-burning-man-the-tech-elite-one-up-one-another.html.
103 Hugo Reinert, “Notes from a Projected Sacrifice Zone,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 17, no. 2 (2018): 597–617.
104 Compare Robbie Ethridge, “Creating the Shatter Zone. Indian Slave Traders and the Collapse of the Southeastern Chiefdoms,” 207–218, in Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians, ed. Ethridge and T.J. Pluckhahn (Tuscaloosa, 2009), with James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, 2009). Unsurprisingly, shatter zones have long played a role in both science fiction and roleplaying games; see, for example, the exuberant setting for Ed Stark, Shatterzone: The Roleplaying Game, boxed set (New York, 1993).
105 Hakim Bay [Peter Lamborn Wilson], T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Williamsburg, 2011 [original 1991]).
106 Reinert, Humphrey, and Safran, “Bhutan,” 6.
107 Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism, 4.
108 Tooze, “Neoliberalism’s World Order,” Dissent 65, no. 3 (Summer 2018): 136.
109 Slobodian and Plehwe, Market Civilizations.
110 Bob Jessop, “The Heartlands of Neoliberalism and the Rise of the Austerity State,” in The Handbook of Neoliberalism, ed. Simon Springer, Kean Birch, and Julie MacLeavy (New York, 2016), 411; adopted in the introduction to Slobodian and Plehwe, Market Civilizations, 7–26.
111 Aguada Parkk, “Free Trade Zones,” accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://www.aguadapark.com/en/free-trade-zone/; this zone does not appear in the Adrianople Group’s 2021 dataset. The proliferation of zones, and their shifting legal status, may mean that no complete count of zones is possible and that the number of zones worldwide is higher than anyone presently has suggested.
112 Shahid Yusuf, “It is Time to Do Away with Special Economic Zones,” Center for Global Development Note, Apr. 2013, 1, 9–10, accessed 12 Dec. 2023, https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/time-do-away-special-economic-zones.pdf.
113 A venerable tradition in economic thought has highlighted the importance of geographic concentration (and cumulative causation within concentrations) for the development of both industries and lagging regions; see, e.g., classic works by François Perroux, “Economic Space: Theory and Applications,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 64 (1950): 89–104; Gunnar Myrdal, Economic Theory and Under-Developed Regions (New York, 1957), and Albert O. Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development (New Haven, 1958). The failure of mainstream economics to model the importance of local geographic concentration was long ago acknowledged from within: Paul Krugman, Geography and Trade (Cambridge, MA, 1991), and Krugman, “Increasing Returns and Economic Geography,” Journal of Political Economy 99 (1991): 483–499. Similar ideas found new life in Michael Porter’s “clusters,” pithily defined in Porter’s “Clusters and the New Economics of Competition,” Harvard Business Review (Nov.–Dec. 1998): 78, column b, and in the so-called New Economic Geography, of which an historiographical overview may be found in Allen J. Scott, “Economic Geography: The Great Half-Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography, ed. Gordon L. Clark, Maryann P. Feldman, and Meric S. Gertler (Oxford, 2000), 18–48. On the “Krugmanian vice” of subsequently discarding such theoretical insights when it comes to real-world economic policies, see Erik S. Reinert, “Industrial Policy: A Long-term Perspective and Overview of Theoretical Arguments,” in The Oxford Handbook of Industrial Policy, ed. Arkebe Oqubay, Christopher Cramer, Ha-Joon Chang, and Richard Kozul-Wright (Oxford, 2020), 524–525.
114 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Lionel Giles (London, 1910), vii, 19, p. 62. Our approach to Slobodian’s book has been admittedly idiosyncratic. We hope other scholars will provide sensitive readings of Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism that engage with other important issues, among them the relationship of his approach to both the so-called “Spatial Turn” in many academic disciplines and to the increasingly important study of pluralism in legal history and theory.