The Path to ‘International Finance’: Bringing (Caribbean) Offshore Financial Centres In; Attenuating the Western Grand Narrative

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is three-fold: it challenges over-determined, hegemonic accounts on the rise of offshore financial centres (OFCs); it seeks to establish the co-constitutive role of OFCs in shaping the cultural habitus of ‘financialisation’; and it begins to account for the growth and resilience of Caribbean OFCs, tracing their roots/routes back to the development of institutionalised finance and public credit in England (circa 1670). This discussion calls into question the uncontested assumption that many of the problems of regulating the international financial system stem from the growth of OFCs. This assumption is at the heart of measures aimed at combating tax avoidance and evasion, tracking terrorist finance, and revising banking confidentiality principles. It animates the constructed category of the Caribbean or Pacific ‘tax or asset haven’, and can be located within the literature on the OFC phenomenon as either complex or fascinating when not posing problems of legitimacy. I treat the thrust for global financial re-regulation as part of the dilemma of neoliberalism: the pressures to further consecrate capital mobility world-wide continually run up against the limitations of the primary political unit (the nation-state) and arrangements for global governance structures that lack political legitimacy and accountability. But I attend to the broader knowledge produced on global financial flows as largely mired in silences and premature closures over the question of OFCs and their general resilience.