Book review: offshoring by John Urry

Offshoring introduces John Urry’s panoptic vision of a world in which democracy is all at sea. While the super-rich secret themselves away on extravagant treasure islands, the rest of the world is hard at work fuelling their indulgence. For Urry, the offshore world is dancing to the tune of Mont Pelerin’s neoliberal thought collective, and the 2007-08 financial crisis can be decoded as an outcome of offshore entanglements – a perfect storm in which offshore finance, unregulated energy markets, excessive consumption, and the waste it generates converged. The book’s closing chapter offers a template for ‘reshoring’, a broad project of democratic reform to be led by a ‘low carbon civil society,’ writes Paul Gilbert.