Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 74-05(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Jean-Christophe Agnew.

This study chronicles an untold dimension of capitalists' centuries-long quest for freedom in an unfree world: it traces the American ascendance of the free zone, an idea without which globalization would be unthinkable. The free zone is a "customs outland" for commodity traffic, an extraterritorial enclave located simultaneously offshore and onshore. This study examines how Americans have embraced the free zone to imagineer an infrastructure for capital to travel ever more liberally through increasingly walled states.

Offshore Onshore makes four main interventions. First, it draws on dozens of archives and thousands of other texts and images to provide an unprecedented historical genealogy of a spatial form now found on every continent; spanning the 1840s to the 1940s, it concerns the largely overlooked period when the content of the form was initially worked out. Likewise, second, it spotlights the United States, the site of the largest and longest-running and yet least-recognized zone system (826 sites at last count, nearly all of them seemingly hidden in plain view). Third, although it tracks how federal administrators built this system, it argues that capitalism demanded it. Complementing but also departing from theoretical treatments of the zone concept that center on questions of sovereignty and citizenship, Offshore Onshore emphasizes the logics and contradictions of capital circulation. It posits the warehouse, not the Italian or Hanseatic free city, as the free zone's germinal form.

Finally, fourth, this study stresses the territoriality and materiality of capital circulation. Its actors are the "space specialists" who have preferred for capital not to move but to stall, the place-bound, rentier capitalists such as the warehouseman and the docks commissioner. Against the grain of the current focus in the humanities on deterritorialized, immaterial and often merely metaphorical "flows" and "networks," this study analyzes the regulatory and physical architecture for grounding capital, from categories like the port-of-entry to tools such as the conveyor belt and the pallet. To look at the legal, economic, and visual history of storage, it contends, moreover, is to grasp the increasing emphasis on the production of circulation, and to see how the warehouse and the port have come to subsume the factory in the age of Amazon and Wal-Mart.