Abstract
Book Reviews Internet Gambling Offshore: Caribbean Struggles over Casino Capitalism. Andrew F. Cooper. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. xvii + 201 pp. (Cloth US$ 85.00) Chronicling the dispute between Antigua and the United States over off- shore Internet gambling, this book is set against the backdrop of the historic speculative boom in finance that precipitated the global financial crisis. Antigua hosted offshore gambling operations that eventually brought it to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to argue—and win—its case against the United States. Other Caribbean islands meanwhile served booking functions for derivatives, insurance, and complicated subsidiary structures. Yet even in the wake of the financial crisis that began in 2008, official sanc- tions against financial speculation have been significantly weaker than those against offshore gambling. Furthermore, despite Antigua’s win at the WTO, the United States was able to stop offshore Internet gambling. The international effort against Caribbean tax havens has not been as success- ful. This fascinating book helps explain why: U.S. politics are full of strange bedfellows, regulatory carve-outs for specific industries, and unlikely alli- ances that thwart easy International Relations (IR) accounts of power in the global political economy. Since ancient times, gambling has faced moral stigma. One reason is the confounding of media of value with mechanisms of chance. States thus have sought to segregate gambling spatially from other economic activities (think Las Vegas . . . or Wall Street). The Internet complicates this enclav- ing. If you are physically in Ohio but logged into a server in Antigua, what is the connection—metaphysical, moral, legal—between the actions of your fingers, the transmission of data through wireless and fiber optic networks, and the act of gambling? There are obvious parallels to offshore finance: registering a company offshore creates a legal fiction that confounds space. Cooper argues that offshore gambling has been an easier target for interna- tional actors than offshore finance because the former is not as “decoupled” from the “real” economy as the latter: it relies on local ancillary labor, media, and advertising in order to achieve the scale to make it profitable (p. 43). Internet gambling is a mass phenomenon; its market is not the high net worth individuals of offshore finance but the common man, sitting at his computer, bored, looking to play some online poker or off-track betting. © 2013 Bill Maurer DOI: 10.1163/22134360-12340028 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Highlights
Chronicling the dispute between Antigua and the United States over offshore Internet gambling, this book is set against the backdrop of the historic speculative boom in finance that precipitated the global financial crisis
Antigua hosted offshore gambling operations that eventually brought it to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to argue—and win—its case against the United States
The international effort against Caribbean tax havens has not been as successful. This fascinating book helps explain why: U.S politics are full of strange bedfellows, regulatory carve-outs for specific industries, and unlikely alliances that thwart easy International Relations (IR) accounts of power in the global political economy
Summary
Chronicling the dispute between Antigua and the United States over offshore Internet gambling, this book is set against the backdrop of the historic speculative boom in finance that precipitated the global financial crisis. Internet Gambling Offshore: Caribbean Struggles over Casino Capitalism. Antigua hosted offshore gambling operations that eventually brought it to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to argue—and win—its case against the United States.
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