Punching holes in history

This article introduces an exchange forum on Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (2023). The book centres the ‘zone’ in a story about the fragmentation of global space, in which the zone works by ‘punching holes in the territory of the nation-state, creating zones of exception with different laws and no democratic oversight’. Crack-Up Capitalism not only builds on the arguments made by Slobodian in Globalists: The End of Empire the Birth of Neoliberalism, but it also asks to re-evaluate broadly accepted historical narratives about globalisation since the early 1990s.