Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism by Brooke Harrington
Published in September, 2024.
In reviewing Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s excellent book, The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World, I wrote that we need more academics (Abrahamian is a journalist) researching wealth and wealth concentration. Turns out, I didn’t need to go far to find an academic digging deeply into how wealth hacks the world. According to Google Maps, Brooke Harrington, author of Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, has her campus office less than 0.4 miles from mine.
You might have caught Harrington, a professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College, from her recent appearance on The Daily Show. If you like what you see in that interview with Jon Stewart, you will love reading Harrington’s book. (Both The New Yorker and the Financial Times honored Offshore as one of the best books of 2024.)
In all sorts of ways, Offshore reads as a fantastic complement to The Hidden Globe. Where Abrahamian focuses on the liminal and extra-judicial places that shield wealth, Harrington introduces us to the people and organizations that ply their trade in these tax havens. As Harrington details through the methodology of participant observation (she trains to become a certified wealth manager), the very rich rely on a well-developed infrastructure to protect and shield their assets. Over 8 years of interviews with wealth management professionals and through visits (sometimes harrowing) to 18 countries and locales, Harrington is able to unpack the mechanics enabling concentrated riches.
Before reading Offshore, I had not understood the size and complexity of the industry devoted to protecting the assets of the very rich. The opaqueness of professions devoted to serving ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs)—defined as those with a net worth of $30 million or more—is entirely intentional.
As Harrington points out, the billions that the ultra-wealthy avoid in paying the taxes they legally owe are dollars that are not available to pay for everything that our government funds, from healthcare to defense to everything in between. How angry might Americans be that their taxes are higher because the very rich have armies of highly trained professionals whose only job is to hide their clients’ wealth?
Why should academics be concerned with the people and structures designed to benefit UHNWIs and their families? For Harrington, examining the system that has evolved to hide wealth and protect the wealthy is critical to understanding how the rich game the system. From this viewpoint, research on political systems and public policy is incomplete without taking into account the role that wealth (and the wealth management industry) plays in determining societal-level political, social and economic outcomes.
As someone who was trained as a sociologist, like Harrington, I can attest to the absence of critical inquiry, theorizing and research focused on wealth and the wealthy. Reading Offshore, I’m convinced that we can’t make sense of what has brought us to this current moment of political weirdness without taking into account the role of the ultra-rich and their enablers.
Are there other books like Offshore that you can recommend that take a critical, rigorous, analytical, and methodologically strong approach to studying the underlying structures of wealth concentration?
What are you reading?
