Simon Rakei

This project locates the advent of extractive mining in Southern Africa at the turn of the nineteenth century with the global formations of offshore finance which characterize non-independent tax havens in the Caribbean. Combining historical research on the development of International Business registration alongside ongoing fieldwork in offshore jurisdictions, the research traces novel corporate restructuring, unregulated zones, and pioneering commercial instruments of corporate finance through imperial statecraft and international taxation from the nineteenth century in the British Empire. By historicizing this Africa-Caribbean connection, the dissertation makes an argument to reconfigure the conceptual postcolonial stakes of value and sovereignty in the circulation of financial capital in international political economy through the nexus of trade, labor, and international law.