Removing stealth from wealth - Brooke Harrington , Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, W.W. Norton & Co., 2024

Scholarly work on economic elites' financial behavior has made considerable strides since Brooke Harrington's (2016) pathbreaking Capital Without Borders.In the interim, empirical studies of wealthy families, wealth managers, and tax maneuvering have helped fill in some of the details that lay beyond the scope of Harrington's original volume.Now, almost a decade later, in an even more unequal global context, Harrington picks up the laudable mantle of making our collective findings digestible to a broader audience.With her new book, Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, Harrington characterizes offshoring as the new colonialism: an underlying system of economic exploitation that sustains global inequality.Selecting colonialism as the book's central analogy accomplishes an important task: helping relate an important yet unwieldy legal-financial dynamic to a more familiar, accessible concept.Increasing research on elites has pinpointed their use of complex tools to preserve and grow wealth (Tait, 2020;Hoang, 2022;Shiffer-Sebba, 2025).In Offshore's introduction, Harrington introduces the readers to the acronym 'MEGO' -'my eyes glazeth over'which characterizes how economic elites use complex, tedious tools that make even the experts who study them lose their focus (5).MEGO's effects, as Harrington points out, extend beyond methodological difficulties.It prevents audiences from paying attention long enough to care.Describing offshoring as a 'new colonialism' is an effective tool for getting people to pay attention.Is colonialism important?Then the arcane laws and practices that constitute offshoring are too.Though Harrington succeeds in succinctly capturing the global extraction of the offshore system by comparing it with colonialism, this comparison is not without its challenges.One inherent challenge is that, as Harrington explains, offshoring is both a system analogous to colonialism and historically derived from it.Thus, 'Colonialism 2.0' (107) demarcates offshoring as both an extractive regime that is more sophisticated and efficient than 'Colonialism 1.0', and its direct historical offshoot.Perhaps for this reason, Harrington is forced to convey a lot of information about British colonialism, offshore jurisdictions, elite incentives, and legal systems before she can thoroughly explain how offshoring relates to traditional colonialism.But she achieves this relatively briskly and supplies a satisfying explanation of the relationship between the two.Thus, the book quickly covers a lot of ground.Drawing from Harrington's original fieldwork for Capital Without Borders, and supplemented by additional interviews, Offshore is organized through five chapters that outline distinct aspects of the complex relationship between offshoring and colonialism.Chapter 1 characterizes the offshore system, why wealthy individuals and tax jurisdictions opt into it, why 'onshore' jurisdictions fail to curtail it, and how its development intertwined with colonialism.The chapter clarifies two important characteristics of the offshore system: offshore jurisdictions primarily sell secrecy, not tax savings, and the offshore system is a misnomer as it also involves jurisdictions as land locked as South Dakota.