The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World

Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. A journalist’s riveting account exposes a parallel universe that has become a haven for the rich and powerful.

A map of the globe shows the world we think we know: sovereign nations that grant and restrict their citizens’ rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside their borders, however, another universe has been engineered into existence. It consists of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, and increasingly for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful.

Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of this hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed their only commodity--bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Over time, economists, theorists, statesmen, and consultants evolved ever more sophisticated ways of exporting and exploiting statelessness, in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers, and charter cities controlled by foreign corporations--even into outer space. By mapping this counter-geography that decides who wins and who loses in the new global order--and how it might be otherwise--The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires.

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a journalist whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, the London Review of Books, and other publications. The author of The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen, she has worked as an editor at The Nation, an opinion editor at Al Jazeera America, and a reporter for Reuters. She grew up in Geneva and lives in Brooklyn.