Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, by Brooke Harrington, is a heavily-endnoted “Norton Short” of about 100 pages—at about half the length of Oxford’s VSI series, that makes Offshore a “Very, Very Short Introduction” to the perils and pleasures of covert wealth management, if you will. I found it to be an utterly compelling (and enraging) read, and would only fault it for its brevity (and since that is by design, I can therefore hardly fault it at all). It makes me want to read much more about this topic in general (fortunately there is a generous related readings section after the endnotes to assist with this), and more by Brooke Harrington in particular (I shall be moving on to her other, much longer at 400pp, work on the topic, Capital Without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent very shortly), for the author proved herself to be a reliable tour guide to the many freeports out there, be they actually in Freeport, Bahamas, on other islands  in the former British Empire—one key sine qua non which makes offshore finance even possible—or elsewhere in copycat islands, city-states, and even American states (Delaware, Montana, and a few others being now leaders in “offshoring” attracting foreign capital from a rogues’ gallery of bad hombres the world over, as it happens)….

But I get ahead of myself.

The author, a professional sociologist at Dartmouth, states that she was inspired to immerse herself in the industry of private wealth management (no……