Scholarly work on economic elites’ financial behavior has made considerable strides since Brooke Harrington’s (Reference Harrington2016) pathbreaking Capital Without Borders. In the interim, empirical studies of wealthy families, wealth managers, and tax maneuvering have helped fill in some of the details that lay beyond the scope of Harrington’s original volume. Now, almost a decade later, in an even more unequal global context, Harrington picks up the laudable mantle of making our collective findings digestible to a broader audience. With her new book, Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, Harrington characterizes offshoring as the new colonialism: an underlying system of economic exploitation that sustains global inequality.

Selecting colonialism as the book’s central analogy accomplishes an important task: helping relate an important yet unwieldy legal-financial dynamic to a more familiar, accessible concept. Increasing research on elites has pinpointed their use of complex tools to preserve and grow wealth (Tait, Reference Tait2020; Hoang, Reference Hoang2022; Shiffer-Sebba, Reference Shiffer-Sebba2025). In Offshore’s introduction, Harrington introduces the readers to the acronym ‘MEGO’ – ‘my eyes glazeth over’ – which characterizes how economic elites use complex, tedious tools that make even the experts who study them lose their focus (5). MEGO’s effects, as Harrington points out, extend beyond methodological difficulties. It prevents audiences from paying attention long enough to care. Describing offshoring as a ‘new colonialism’ is an effective tool for getting people to pay attention. Is colonialism important? Then the arcane laws and practices that constitute offshoring are too.

Though Harrington succeeds in succinctly capturing the global extraction of the offshore system by comparing it with colonialism, this comparison is not without its challenges. One inherent challenge is that, as Harrington explains, offshoring is both a system analogous to colonialism and historically derived from it. Thus, ‘Colonialism 2.0’ (107) demarcates offshoring as both an extractive regime that is more sophisticated and efficient than ‘Colonialism 1.0’, and its direct historical offshoot. Perhaps for this reason, Harrington is forced to convey a lot of information about British colonialism, offshore jurisdictions, elite incentives, and legal systems before she can thoroughly explain how offshoring relates to traditional colonialism. But she achieves this relatively briskly and supplies a satisfying explanation of the relationship between the two.

Thus, the book quickly covers a lot of ground. Drawing from Harrington’s original fieldwork for Capital Without Borders, and supplemented by additional interviews, Offshore is organized through five chapters that outline distinct aspects of the complex relationship between offshoring and colonialism. Chapter 1 characterizes the offshore system, why wealthy individuals and tax jurisdictions opt into it, why ‘onshore’ jurisdictions fail to curtail it, and how its development intertwined with colonialism. The chapter clarifies two important characteristics of the offshore system: offshore jurisdictions primarily sell secrecy, not tax savings, and the offshore system is a misnomer as it also involves jurisdictions as land locked as South Dakota.

Chapter 2 homes in on the ultra-wealthy, how they use the offshore system and how they justify their actions to themselves and others. It argues that rampant elite usage of offshoring should be regarded as elite ‘revolt’, which like colonialism, carries grave consequences for inequality, intergenerational mobility, and democracy.

Chapter 3 pinpoints the causal linkages between British colonialism and the offshore system. It argues that the British imperial legal and tax system, combined with its fiscal attitudes towards colonies, created the right setting for the development of independent legal-economic systems that can attract global private wealth. These features allowed offshore jurisdictions to protect the wealth of the global elite from their jurisdictions of origin without losing those origin-jurisdictions’ recognition of offshore courts and financial instruments.

Chapter 4 shifts the focus to some of offshoring’s harms to colony-tax-havens, as well as the metropole. It paints a picture of jurisdictions that do not merely hone their legal and banking sectors to attract global capital but also marshal state violence and strategic assets (like the Panama Canal) to further the utility of their jurisdictions to elites. These choices often come at the expense of offshore jurisdictions’ local residents, and London does not remain immune to deleterious social ramifications either.

Finally, Chapter 5 offers thoughts about how we might conceptualize this new colonialism going forward: an effective system that separates the global elite from the rest through secrecy and hidden exploitation. In this chapter Harrington also proposes solutions, including banning wealth managers from using offshore jurisdictions.

Though Offshore is considerably shorter than Capital Without Borders, it nonetheless contributes several new insights that help advance scholarly work on offshoring and elites. One, of course, is the book’s central argument that we should consider the offshore system as a new type of colonialism: a global apparatus that systematically extracts resources from some groups and channels them to others using legal jurisdictional arbitrage and expertise.

No less interesting is Harrington’s identification of the differences between the two systems: while Colonialism 1.0 uses overt violence, inspiring moral condemnation and emancipatory counter-movements (107), Colonialism 2.0 uses covert, fiscal violence (or ‘social murder’, as Harrington quotes Engels), which creates deprivation and death through lopsided taxation and welfare policies. The methods of the new colonialism, leveraging tools like MEGO, thus disorient its potential critics, who instead channel their frustration and anger into political populism and xenophobia. Thus, Harrington compellingly argues that we should conceptualize the offshore system less as profit-maximizing and more as secrecy-maximizing. Secrecy is the main unifying product of offshore jurisdictions and professionals; tax-minimization and other profit-seeking activities are less universal. This is not the first characterization of the offshore system as secrecy-obsessed (indeed, it is not Harrington’s first characterization of it as such), but it is among the best packaged for a lay audience. Harrington elevates secrecy to the status of marker and enabler of contemporary global privilege (16), and as noted above, a crucial distinguisher between the old and the new colonialism.

Following her insight that offshore havens are secrecy-maximizers, Harrington fittingly concludes the book by calling to generate change through shifting social norms rather than laws. She notes that while economic elites and their professionals have an iron grip on many legal systems, which are slow to change anyway, these same elites are surprisingly reactive to social stigma, which they try to avoid using secrecy. This call seems apt, but additional details would be useful. For one, as Reeves and Friedman (Reference Reeves and Friedman2024) note in their recent book, economic elites pursue secrecy not just to maximize resources, but also to avoid the stigma associated with large fortunes. Thus, for some elites, enhancing the stigma around tax havens will produce a damned if you do, damned if you don’t dynamic. This raises questions about how we hope social stigma will address the issue if not through legislation. Voluntary on-shoring of elite wealth? The firing of professionals?

Nevertheless, Offshore is an exemplary model for public sociology that seeks to make important complex research accessible, making it excellent reading for both a lay audience and undergraduate students. The book was probably written in a less pessimistic political moment than today, when popular narratives were arguably more open to embracing a critique of the offshore industry and its clients. But it was also written in a moment when legal change seemed more possible. At least in the context of the United States, legal action on offshore havens seems a far cry from political reality. Maybe social stigma is, comparatively, more within our reach. If it were possible, a book like Offshore, which makes the relevant complex dynamics digestible, would be a key part of the solution.