Latest news with #IanKumekawa
Spectator
21-05-2025
- General
- Spectator
Round the world in a vast, unlovely barge
Ships change not just their location but their identity throughout their lives. Medieval trading vessels became warships at royal command. The Queen Mary was a troop ship during the second world war. Ian Kumekawa, of Harvard University, has had the clever idea of following a modern ship through its metamorphoses and asking how these changes in use reflect the economic conditions of our time. But this ship is no Queen Mary. He calls it the Vessel, because it changes its name and owner so many times. Without its superstructure, no one would give it a second glance. It has neither an engine nor a rudder. It had to be mounted on a heavy-lift ship or towed to reach it destination. It is, in fact, a simple steel barge, originally little more than a hull, built on the outskirts of Stockholm in 1979 and sold to Norwegian owners. But it has moved extraordinary distances: first to Scapa Flow in Scotland, then to Gothenburg in Sweden, before being taken to the Falkland Islands, a Volkswagen factory on the German coast, Manhattan, Portland Bill in England and Onne in Nigeria, where it is now laid up, rusting away. Meanwhile its superstructure has provided accommodation for British troops, Gastarbeiter, American and British prisoners and oil workers in the Gulf of Guinea. The many vicissitudes of the Vessel, along with a sister ship that shared some of the same journeys, provide Kumekawa with a springboard from which he can jump to lengthy discussions of the global economy. It is a history of economic flux.
Bloomberg
09-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
How One Little Barge Explains the History of Globalization
Donald Trump's return to the White House has sent shockwaves through the world economy, and his tariffs — the highest in a century — have sent economists, executives and investors scrambling to explain what's happening. After decades of hyper-globalized commerce, some see a world turning more protectionist, with supply lines shifting closer to home and capital flows increasingly guided by geopolitical rivalries. How did we get here? There are many comprehensive histories of the recent era of globalization, but a new book takes a novel approach, tracing the ebbs and flow of global commerce through the prism of an unlikely subject. Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge (Knopf, May 2025) by Harvard academic Ian Kumekawa tracks the history of a barge that, since its construction in a dockyard outside Stockholm in the 1970s, has experienced a shipping crash, an energy boom and the Falklands War.
New York Times
07-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Book Review: ‘Empty Vessel,' by Ian Kumekawa
EMPTY VESSEL: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge, by Ian Kumekawa Container ships are designed to be blandly functional. Gigantic metal platforms, they chug along from port to port and are habitually taken for granted — until, that is, they run aground on the jagged rocks of catastrophe. When the pandemic arrived five years ago, Americans who were trying in vain to procure protective gear like face masks got an unwanted lesson in the intricacies of global supply chains. Today, in the wake of Trump's tariffs, including a whopping 145 percent on China, the exact locations of container ships have become a matter of grim fascination. Over the last couple of weeks, social media users have been posting live maps of cargo traffic as if on hurricane watch. 'Normally, the physical dimension of globalization remains in the background, relatively unnoticed,' Ian Kumekawa writes in his new book, 'Empty Vessel.' A historian at Harvard, he realized that one way to make the abstract workings of the global economy more concrete would be to tether them to something you could touch. The 'empty vessel' of his title is a barge made of steel that weighs 9,500 deadweight tons. It has served as a 'floatel' for oil rig workers, a barracks for British soldiers, a jail for New York City inmates, among other things. Like Zelig, it adapted to whatever it was expected to be: 'Its emptiness has been its defining characteristic.' This elegant and enlightening book is an impressive feat, especially given that its main character is, as Kumekawa admits, stubbornly uncharismatic: 'a dumb pontoon without voice, personality or drive.' Constructed in a Swedish shipyard in 1979, the vessel and its sister ship were container barges built too late to carry actual cargo. Western countries like Sweden and the United States had already entered an era of industrial decline. Shipping capacity began to outstrip demand in the early 1970s. Then the oil crisis hit. 'We used to make things here' became a familiar refrain.
Wall Street Journal
05-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
‘Empty Vessel' Review: Sailing the Trade Winds
Thanks to Donald Trump, the world has been getting a crash course in antiglobalism from a populist-right perspective. Perhaps the singular merit of Ian Kumekawa's 'Empty Vessel' is to remind us that, before President Trump steamrolled the news cycle with tariffs, globalism was already a well-established whipping post on the populist left.
