Vanessa Ogle
UC Berkeley, History, Faculty Member
- Transnational History, History of Globalization, The Mediterranean as Contact Zone, European Imperialism and Colonialism, Europe and the Middle East, History, and 7 moreHuman Rights, Development Economics, Human Rights Law, International Political Economy, Transnationalism, United Nations, and Cold War and Cultureedit
- Associate Professor, Late Modern European History, UC Berkeley, 2017- Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Modern European History, University of Pennsylvania 2011-2017 PhD, Harvard University, 2011 Writing a history of the offsh... moreAssociate Professor, Late Modern European History, UC Berkeley, 2017-
Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Modern European History, University of Pennsylvania 2011-2017
PhD, Harvard University, 2011
Writing a history of the offshore world, 1920s-1970s.
Interests: European history, British/French/German history, political economy, capitalism, offshore finance, tax avoidance, globalization, empire and colonialism.
PUBLICATIONS
Book:
The Global Transformation of Time: 1870 – 1950 (Harvard University Press, October 2015, 288p.).
Social Science History Association (SSHA) President’s Award, 2014, given annually to best manuscript of a first book
Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ 2016 prize for a best first book written by a woman on any topic other than women, gender, sexuality
American Historical Association George Louis Beer Prize 2016, given annually to the best book in European international history since 1895
Current project:
Archipelago Capitalism: A History of the Offshore World, 1920s-1980s; book-length study on the history of tax havens, foreign trade zones/export processing zones, flags of convenience, and offshore finance
Future projects:
City on the Edge: A History of Tangier, 1880s-1970s
Articles
Published/Forthcoming
“Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1940s-1970s,” forthcoming, American Historical Review, December 2017.
“State Rights against Private Capital: The “New International Economic Order” and the Struggle over Aid, Trade, and Foreign Investment, 1962-1980,” Humanity 5 no. 2 (2014): 211-234.
“Whose Time Is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s-1940s,” American Historical Review 120, no. 5 (December 2013): 1376-1402.
Best Article Prize, Council for European Studies, 2014edit
This article explores the question of what happened to European assets in the process of decolonization. It argues that decolonization created a money panic of sorts that led white settlers, businessmen, and officials to seek to liquidate... more
This article explores the question of what happened to European assets in the process of decolonization. It argues that decolonization created a money panic of sorts that led white settlers, businessmen, and officials to seek to liquidate assets they owned and move funds out of the colonial world. Instead of being repatriated to metropolitan countries with high tax rates and exchange controls, money moved to tax havens. Decolonization thus provided an important share of early postwar tax haven business in a period when tax havens and offshore finance expanded during the 1950s and 1960s. In turn, the withdrawal of Euro-American investments from the decolonizing world set the stage for the politics of development and modernization in the coming decades. Ironically, the outflow of funds during decolonization and the subsequent return of some funds in restructured form as investments by multinational and other companies soon caused difficulties in newly independent developing countries. Companies soon found ways to rebook profits to have occurred in a tax haven rather than in the developing world, thus depriving low-income countries from tax revenue. The withdrawal of Euro-American investments from the colonial world during decolonization moreover had implications for the growth of portfolio investment, as funds removed from colonies were often invested through a tax haven onwards in US securities. All in all, decolonization was an economic and financial event that is only beginning to emerge in full detail.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This article traces the emergence of an archipelago-like landscape of distinct legal and economic spaces throughout the long midcentury. Consisting of tax havens, offshore financial markets, flags of convenience, and economic free zones,... more
This article traces the emergence of an archipelago-like landscape of distinct legal and economic spaces throughout the long midcentury. Consisting of tax havens, offshore financial markets, flags of convenience, and economic free zones, this archipelago allowed free-market capitalism to flourish on the sidelines of a world increasingly dominated by more sizeable and interventionist nation-states. It argues that certain characteristics of the rise of free market capitalism since the 1970s and 1980s were previously practiced in the offshore archipelago, only to move back to Europe and North America with the rise of neoliberalism.