Empty Vessel is a brilliant allegory which turns the history of a hulk – an engineless rectangular barge bearing stacks of shipping containers converted into basic living units – into a lament for the dehumanising impact of modern capitalism and globalisation. 

Conceived as a support ship for the North Sea oil industry but converted to accommodation for offshore workers, ‘the Vessel’ – as we learn to call it, because its name (along with its function and owner) has changed repeatedly –  served as a barracks in the Falklands, as a prison on both sides of the Atlantic and as a token in a complex financial boardgame. A sister ship built in the same yard followed a parallel trajectory until it was scrapped in India in 2022. Another ship very like them, the Bibby Stockholm, made headlines when it was moored at Portland Harbour in Dorset in 2023 to serve as a hostel for asylum seekers. 

The Harvard historian Ian Kumekawa follows the ship’s course with a mix of polemical passion and attention to detail, documenting the many changes of ownership and registrations in ‘tax haven after tax haven’. In each phase of its forty-five-year life, the Vessel has taken on ‘meaning from what, or whom,