Ian Kumekawa on Globalization As Told Through One Ship

How do you write the history of something as abstract, as placeless, and as vast as the globalization that has remade our world over the past several decades? 

If you’re Ian Kumekawa, you make those immaterial forces concrete by telling the story of one object: a hulking 94-meter-long steel barge he calls “The Vessel.” 

From housing for oil roughnecks in the North Sea, to a barracks for British soldiers in the Falklands, to a jail docked on a Manhattan pier, the Vessel reveals how the murky world of offshore capitalism is in fact embodied in tangible things. It always involves real people living and working in real places. 

This one ship, then, helps us to see the too-often-invisible material reality of global capitalism at the close of the twentieth century.