Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire by Kojo Koram

Author:Kojo Koram [Koram, Kojo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529338621
Publisher: John Murray Press
Published: 2022-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

Freedom for Capital

The concept of a ‘freeport’, a port where trade can be allowed to flourish free from the taxes, rules and regulations usually insisted on by the sovereign authority of the land, has been around at least as long as the sea-cities of the Italian Renaissance. During the rise of European empires, the French (Marseilles), the Germans (Hamburg) and the Belgians (Antwerp) all used the freeport model at times in an attempt to gain a foothold in global trade. But Britain, despite being the largest sea trading empire of them all, did not create any freeports on the British Isles.69 The only places the British Empire experimented with the freeport model were in its colonial outposts, in Hong Kong, Singapore and the West Indies.70 Until the late twentieth century, freeports were still a relatively rare phenomenon and, with decolonisation and the rise of the UN seemingly heralding the age of sovereign nation states, they might have been expected to disappear into the pages of history books. Yet the re-emergence of the freeport has been among the most significant changes that global capitalism has undertaken in the last fifty years.

When Michael Manley agreed to open the Kingston Free Zone in 1976, there were seventy-nine free-trade zones (FTZs) across twenty-five different countries. By 2006, the year before the global economy would begin to collapse, there were 3,500 FTZs spread among 130 of the world’s 193 countries.71 Where they once occupied a few coastal outposts, freeports now span the globe – not just as conventional ports but also as cities, airports and rural areas that are exempt from the taxation or customs laws that govern the rest of the country. The freeport is a character with many names. It is known as the ‘export processing zone’ in the Philippines, the ‘special economic zone’ in China or the ‘foreign trade zone’ in India; a network of interconnected cogs tied together to facilitate global trade outside of the prying eyes of host nation states.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when sovereign debt led to country after country agreeing to structural adjustment programmes with the IMF and World Bank in exchange for further loans, one of the policies governments would be encouraged to undertake was the creation of FTZs where exemption from local regulation could attract international corporate investment.72 Jamaica ended up signing more structural agreement deals than almost any other country in the decade after Manley first brought in the IMF in the late 1970s.73 Therefore, it also served as a test case for the modern freeport model, as the creation of FTZs became a key part of the IMF’s demand for Jamaica to increase its non-traditional exports. The first freeport set up on the island was the Kingston Free Zone, established in 1976. The Montego Bay Free Zone followed in 1985, soon joined by the Garmex Free Zone, Hayes Free Zone and Cazoumar Free Zone. In addition to tax-free trade, companies in the FTZs also get to escape the usual licensing laws, employment regulations and controls around business practices that govern the rest of the country.

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