Sailing the Trade Winds

"Empty Vessel

By Ian Kumekawa

Knopf, 336 pages, $29

Thanks to Donald Trump, the world has been getting a crash course in antiglobalism from a populist-right perspective. Perhaps the singular merit of Ian Kumekawa's "Empty Vessel" is to remind us that, before President Trump steamrolled the news cycle with tariffs, globalism was already a well-established whipping post on the populist left.

Mr. Kumekawa, a historian at Harvard, traces the history of a container ship, which he frames as a symbol of the acceleration (until recently) in world trade and of the economic changes, such as deindustrialization in the West, he claims it has fostered.

His plan is also his subtitle: "The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge." It's a fine symbol -- a ship built in Sweden for a Norwegian shipping magnate, to be registered in the Bahamas and employed, over four-plus decades, in the North Sea, the Falkland Islands, Germany, the U.S., the British Isles and Nigeria.

The ship was sold numerous times, reflagged in multiple tax havens, rechristened so often that the author sensibly refers to it as "the Vessel." Mr. Kumekawa posits that the ship's stateless quality characterizes global trade itself -- fair enough. It is an "empty vessel," he repeatedly writes, a "chameleon" assuming the quality of its serial tenants.

Containerized shipping, developed to supply U.S. armed forces in Vietnam, revolutionized trade by making loading and unloading about as easy as assembling a Lego set. The key was modularity -- using snugly fitting crates designed to stack atop one another, secured with simple, interlocking hardware.

Mr. Kumekawa is impressed -- who wouldn't be by such a marked improvement in efficiency? -- but he devotes most of "Empty Vessel" to indicting neoliberalism, a program of relaxations on global capital and trade, for alleged offenses including racism, "extractive imperialism" and fostering "continuities between the slave trade and the trade in Nigerian oil."

Sometime over the past 50 years somebody in America bought a washing machine they couldn't have afforded otherwise, and two billion people in the developing world left poverty behind, courtesy of freer trade, but that is not the story Mr. Kumekawa is interested in telling.

The Vessel, we are told, was built by a shipyard that had been nationalized by the Swedish government, which invested billions to save the national industry from lower-wage Asian competition. Most of the local industry failed anyway.

After its completion in 1979 the Vessel was refitted to hold not goods but people. Though hardly luxury, it featured a library and bars, a swimming pool and squash courts, along with rooms with private baths to house hundreds of temporary workers. Over the ensuing decades, when not idled by lawsuits or bankruptcies, it would provide living quarters for deep-sea salvaging, oil drilling and an onshore auto plant.

When the private sector proved an unreliable client, the Vessel was thrust into public service. In 1982 it was leased to the British defense ministry to house soldiers following Britain's successful military operation in the Falklands. (The author harbors a particular disdain for Margaret Thatcher.) It later served as a prison ship, to relieve overcrowding, in both New York and England's Isle of Portland.

Mr. Kumekawa's story is not so much about the ship itself; it's about the various industries and public entities it has served, offering "a window onto the profound and dynamic changes that have buffeted and shaped the world economy." As a narrative device, this formula worked in the 1964 movie "The Yellow Rolls-Royce," which told the story of three successive car owners (an English aristocrat, who discovers his wife and her lover in flagrante in the back of the Rolls, followed by a gangster and then a wealthy American widow). The movie was racier and the Rolls at least had an engine; the Vessel does not (it has to be towed across the seas).

Perhaps to supply some punch, Mr. Kumekawa strains for effect. When the Vessel arrives in the Isle of Portland for prison duty, he writes that it "represented a return to a violent carceral past." Actually, the boat became a tourist attraction, the floating cell praised by inmates and locals. Similarly, he refers to policing power as "state violence." And in his effort to paint the ship as a burden to workers and localities, he tells us that "the air-conditioning system often needed repair." Has that never happened on land?

His chapter on the Vessel's time in New York, at the end of Ed Koch's disputatious reign as mayor in the 1980s, ties globalism to rising rates of incarceration for what Mr. Kumekawa terms New York's "perceived crime problem." Belying "perceived," he states that crack cocaine led to "extreme violence" and that an estimated 60% of inmates were "addicted to drugs and/or alcohol." This is far afield from global trade, and Mr. Kumekawa seems out of his depth. He implies that the Federal Reserve's high interest rates in the early 1980s did not stifle inflation, which they certainly did, and did not cause as severe a contraction as expected. Yet, according to the Fed, the 1982 recession "was the worst economic downturn in the United States since the Great Depression."

Mr. Kumekawa depicts international shipping as a step beyond the law, characterized by shell companies, shady dealings and rogues. It's interesting to read that ships like the Vessel exploit the lax rules and lower taxes of -- who knew? -- 5,000 free zones.

But his repeated sneering at the capitalist West and his arch rhetoric make for heavy reading. He says three times that the Vessel is an "artifact of global capitalism," in addition to many similar variations (e.g., an "exemplar of the globalized, financialized, and increasingly abstracted" modern world). Mr. Kumekawa has a dubious talent for expressing simple points with big words. He finds it profound that the Vessel is both "a concrete object" and "an abstracted artifact," but anyone with a mortgage is familiar with the idea that a physical house can be conceptualized.

Underlying "Empty Vessel" is a reflexive antipathy to globalism, a working assumption that things from other places are suspect. Mr. Kumekawa would cringe at being called a Trumper, but he and the president are similarly hostile to trade and professedly ignorant of its blessings.

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Mr. Lowenstein is the author of "Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War."” [1]

Most of the West deindustrialized and is getting doomed because of that. Some people have blessings from this. We hope that Mr. Lowenstein is one of those people.

1.  Sailing the Trade Winds. Lowenstein, Roger.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 06 May 2025: A15.