In Episode #236, historian Ian Kumekawa joins Osi to trace the hidden history of globalization through an unlikely protagonist: a barge. In his book Empty Vessel, Ian follows a single ship as it morphs from a barracks in the Falklands to a floating jail in New York to worker housing in Germany, changing names and nations with each new economic demand. The ship becomes a powerful symbol of a world shaped by neoliberalism, offshore economies, and market flexibility. They discuss how this unremarkable barge reveals the architecture of our modern global economy and the forces that continue to shape it.

Link to Empty Vessel: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/741342/empty-vessel-by-ian-kumekawa/

Ian Kumekawa is a historian at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University. He is the author of Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge and The First Serious Optimist: A. C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics (2017). He has taught at Harvard and MIT. He hails from Clinton, CT and now lives in Boston.