While FDI is generally assumed to represent long-term investments within the “real” economy, approximately 30-50% of global FDI is accounted for by networks of offshore shell companies created by corporations and wealthy individuals for tax and other purposes. To date, there has been limited systematic research on the global structure of these networks. Here we address this gap by employing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to decompose the global bilateral FDI anomaly matrix into its primary constituent sub-networks. We find that the global offshore FDI network is highly globalized, with a centralized “Network Core” of offshore jurisdictions in Northwest Europe and the Caribbean exercising a largely homogeneous influence over economies worldwide. To the extent that the network is internally differentiated, this appears to primarily reflect a historical layering of social and political relationships. We identify four primary offshore FDI sub-networks, bearing the imprint of four key processes and events: European, particularly UK colonialism, the post-WWII hegemonic alliance between the US and Western Europe, the fall of Soviet communism, and the rise of Chinese capitalism.

The comparative study of empires has traditionally been addressed in the widest possible global historical perspective with comparison of New World empires such as the Aztecs and Incas side by side with the history of imperial Rome and the empires of China and Russia in the medieval and modern periods. Surprisingly little work has been carried out focusing on the evolution of state control and imperial administration in the same territory; approached in a rigorous and historically grounded fashion over a wide extent of historical time from late antiquity to the twentieth century. The empires of Rome, Byzantium, the Ottomans and the latter-day imperialists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all inherited or seized and sought to develop overlapping parts of a common territorial base in the Eastern Mediterranean and all struggled to contain, control or otherwise alter the political, cultural and spiritual allegiances of the same indigenous population groups that were brought under their rule and administration. The task undertaken in Imperial Lineages and Legacies in the Eastern Mediterranean is to investigate the balance between continuity and change adopted at various historical conjunctures when new imperial regimes were established and to expose common features and shared approaches to the challenge of imperial rule that united otherwise divergent societies and imperial administrations. The work incorporates the contributions by twelve scholars, each leading practitioners in their respective fields and each contributing their particular insights on the shared theme of imperial identity and legacy in the Mediterranean World of the pagan, Christian and Muslim eras.

A common thread throughout the essays in this volume is a focus on new loci of power that emerge either in collision with colonial power structures, or in collaboration with or those that emerge in the wake of decolonization. While the authors recognize the presence of a larger structure of colonial hegemony, they also investigate those centers of power that emerge in the interstices of crevices of colonial power. Interdisciplinary and theoretically innovative, this book offers a global perspective on colonial and national landscapes, rewrites the master creator narrative, examines national landscapes as sites of contestation and views the globalization of processes such as archaeology beyond the boundaries of the national.

The book focuses on contemporary African cities, caught in the contradiction of an imperial past and postcolonial present. The essays explore the cultural role of colonial architecture and urbanism in the production of meanings: in the inscription of power and discipline, as well as in the dynamic construction of identities. It is in these new dense urban spaces, with all their contradictions, that urban Africans are reworking their local identities, building families, and creating autonomous communities – made fragile by neo-liberal states in a globalizing world. The book offers a range of scholarly interpretations of the new forms of urbanity. It engages with issues, themes and topics including colonial legacies, postcolonial intersections, cosmopolitan spaces, urban reconfigurations, and migration which are at the heart of the continuing debate about the trajectory of contemporary African cities. The collection discusses contemporary African cities as diverse as Dar Es Salaam, Dakar, Johannesburg, Lagos and Kinshasa – offering new insights into the current state of postcolonial African cities. This was previously published as a special issue of African Identities.

Offshore financial centers such as Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands or the City of London provide non-residents with a legal framework that is strong on property rights and soft on taxation and regulation. Building on a historical-institutionalist comparison of Britain, Germany, Brazil, and Mexico, Offshore Finance and State Power asks how these offshore financial services affect the power of the state. Combining a concept analysis with empirical research, the book finds that economic actors go offshore to create money more than to hide it. Legal offshore banking trumps tax planning or money laundering in its impact on state power. Offshore Finance and State Power also reveals that the relationship between the two is not straightforward. Offshore finance can limit state power by transmitting the volatility of unregulated offshore banking into the domestic economy. Yet, counterintuitively, offshore finance can also enhance state power. It provides governments with an extraterritorial vehicle to cover up political conflicts over how to finance the state and to mitigate class conflict. To which extent a state can put offshore finances at its own service, depends on a country's domestic elite constellation and the tax and bank bargains they have forged throughout history.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Although modern civilization revolves around money, the nature of money is paradoxical. It is nothing more than a representation of and medium for decentralized networks of social trust, but its production is controlled by highly centralized networks of firms, places, and governments, and there is never enough of it to go around. Moreover, given that the creation of money, as credit, is based on expectations, money is at its heart an instrument for human agency to change the future. However, the financial systems that produce money are deeply rooted in the past, and perpetuate themselves through history. Sticky Power seeks to deepen our understanding of the paradox of money by introducing a novel conceptual lens, Global Financial Networks, to cast new light on the geography, history, politics, and sociology of finance from the Middle Ages to the global financial crisis and beyond. It shows that the power of finance is inherently sticky: apparently new innovations such as offshore finance actually date back centuries, and global financial networks more broadly have adapted to the rise and fall of empires and the development of new technologies while changing surprisingly little in their basic character, or at most changing very slowly. Haberly and Wójcik argue that a recognition of the mechanics of this durability calls for a new approach to reforming finance--one less reactively focused on regulation, and more proactively focused on building new institutional systems with a long-term sticky power of their own.

Written by Neil M. Coe, this Advanced Introduction provides a comprehensive guide to the vibrant and expanding global production network (GPN) approach, through deftly exploring its antecedents, theoretical underpinnings, and debates and controversies in the field. The author argues overall that, during a time of profound on-going challenges within the global economic system, the need for a GPN framework has never been more pressing.