“The term free port can mean everything from a little warehouse to a massive port with container ships coming and going every hour,” says Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “But, basically, a free port is an island, a cordoned-off piece of land, where the rules are not the same as outside. In economics and history, we sometimes talk about onshore and offshore. Onshore and offshore don't really refer to shores or land. They just refer to legal regimes. A free port will be offshore, and if you walk ten feet through a gate, you’re back onshore. It’s fiction. It’s a legal construct.”

 

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, author of The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World. Their conversation charts and explores the offshore archipelago of freeports, detention facilities, and other extraterritorial zones with which over the past few centuries—on land, on sea, in space, on islands encircled by water and islands encircled by fences, within the borders of nation states and beyond them—we’ve stitched together our global economy.

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WORKS CITED

(In order of mention.)

 

John R. Gillis. Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

 

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2024.

 

Louis Degenhardt. “What is conscious uncoupling?,” The Guardian, March 26, 2014.

 

Lon L. Fuller. Legal Fictions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967.

 

Marco Polo. The Travels of Marco Polo. Edited by Manuel Komroff, translated by William Marsden, and introduced by Jason Goodwin. New York: Modern Library, 2001.

 

Chris Lehmann. Rich People Things: Real Life Secrets of the Predator Class. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011.

 

Alexandra Bregman. The Bouvier Affair: A True Story. Alexandra Bregman, 2019.

 

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Paul Romer. “Why the world needs charter cities,” TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009.

 

Plato. Republic. In Plato: Complete Works. Translated by G.M.A. Grube and revised by C.D.C. Reeve. Edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.

 

Thomas More. Utopia. Translated and introduced by Paul Turner. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

 

“Giant Leak of Offshore Financial Records Exposes Global Array of Crime and Corruption,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, April 3, 2016.

 

Matthew Caruana Galizia, Mar Cabra, Margot Williams, Emilia Díaz-Struck, Delphine Reuter, and Cecile S. Gallego. “Explore the Documents: Luxembourg Leaks Database,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, November 5, 2014.

 

“Law of 20 July 2017 on the exploration and use of spaces resources,” Journal Officiel du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg, July 28, 2017.

 

Herman Melville. Moby-Dick: A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Hershel Parker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.

 

“Annual Lists of Scrapped Ships,” NGO Shipbreaking Platform.

 

Mary Shelley. Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus, The 1818 Text. Introduced by Jeanette Winterson. New York: Vintage Books, 2025.