Some of the contemporary features of Geneva and elements of its history give insight on how the city functions as “the capital of the hidden globe” (11). Much of the old town of the city has remained largely unchanged throughout the centuries. In the central cathedral of the town, St. Peter’s, the altarpiece, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, was removed during the Protestant Reformation. The painting depicts Jesus Christ on Lake Geneva without a reflection. Abrahamian argues that this is symbolic of how typical laws of nature do not apply in Geneva, although now “wealth has replaced God” (13).

The economy of Geneva relies on Geneva being a place where much of the world’s commerce is conducted without the actual goods being traded. This is in part made possible by Swiss banking laws, which historically made it illegal to disclose the names of the owners of bank accounts, making it an ideal location for complex, secret financial transactions, money laundering, and tax avoidance. Dictators, billionaires, and others around the world hold trillions of dollars in Swiss banks. In 2015, there was “a partial rollback” (18) of some of these secrecy laws.

English author Mary Shelley wrote her renowned novel Frankenstein in 1816 while summering just outside Geneva. Dr. Frankenstein is Genevese, and Abrahamian describes Frankenstein’s monster, a chimera made of disparate corpses who wanders the earth “animated by hubris and greed” (21), as a metaphor for the hidden globe system. Abrahamian then describes the United Nations, which is headquartered in Geneva, and its related organizations. UN employees have special rights, such as being immune from prosecution; the UN also has its own jurisdictional powers.

Abrahamian gives a brief history of Switzerland. In 1291, three Swiss cantons (semi-autonomous territories) joined forces against the Hapsburg Empire. In 1315, they fought off an invasion and earned a reputation as fierce fighters. The expanding Swiss Confederation began to send out its soldiers to serve as mercenaries for other forces, both to make money and to reduce overpopulation. These soldiers (called free lancers, from which we get the modern term) became an important commodity for the cantons. Abrahamian notes that Geneva was not part of the Swiss Confederation, but it learned a lesson from this market.

In the 15th century, Geneva was an important trading town where the Medicis—the preeminent Florentine banking family—opened a bank. In 1541, Protestant leader John Calvin arrived in Geneva. Calvinism encouraged hard work. Abrahamian cites German sociologist Max Weber’s argument in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904) that the Calvinist doctrine of hard work contributed to “the material success” (28) of Protestants in Geneva and elsewhere. Geneva became an important haven for Protestants fleeing Catholic persecution in France and elsewhere in Europe.

In the 18th century, Genevese financiers, including the King of France’s financial minister Jacques Necker, began selling and speculating on tranches of annuities taken out in the names of young bourgeois Swiss women that would pay out over the women’s lifetimes.

Abrahamian argues that the commodification of mercenary soldiers and the transformation of Swiss women’s lives into financial instruments share a similar logic of abstraction and speculation based on the human body that she terms “the metaphysics of globalization” (31).

Abrahamian provides a brief biography of the controversial anti-capitalist activist and public intellectual Jean Ziegler and an account of her interview with him. Ziegler was born in Berne, Switzerland, in 1934 to a conservative upper-middle-class family. He was originally a conservative student activist and became a lawyer. In the 1950s, he moved to Paris and studied sociology at the Sorbonne, where he became friends with authors Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and embraced more left-wing political ideas. Ziegler joined the Communist Party, although he was later “expelled over his support for Algerian independence” (36). He briefly sold mutual funds in Switzerland before leaving to study sociology at Columbia University in New York City. In 1961, he went on a UN mission to Kinshasa, Congo, shortly after the US-backed coup of Patrice Lumumba and installation of the “kleptocrat” Mobutu Sese Seko. Ziegler was horrified to learn that Mobutu had stolen Congo’s wealth and put it in Swiss banks.

Inspired and encouraged by Che Guevera, whom he chauffeured during Che’s visit to Geneva, Ziegler began to advocate against Switzerland’s “secondary imperialism,” or the way in which Switzerland helped imperial powers control poorer nations and people through permissive, secretive banking structures and regulations. In 1976, Ziegler published Switzerland: The Awful Truth which laid out his argument. He was subsequently sued for defamation.

Switzerland became a tax haven in the early 20th century when it began marketing its relatively lower tax rates to the wealthy. In 1932, a bank in Basel, Switzerland, was caught by French authorities in Paris advising wealthy French people on how to avoid paying French taxes. The Swiss bank returned the funds to France, but in 1934, Switzerland passed its bank secrecy laws to avoid future scandals of this sort. In 2014, these laws were partially rolled back to meet international banking compliance regulations.

Ziegler and others highlighted how Swiss banks allowed the Nazis to get around international sanctions. The Nazis sold gold stolen from Jewish people to Swiss banks in exchange for Swiss francs. They then purchased weapons and other goods with Swiss francs from companies that could exchange Swiss francs for gold in Swiss banks. Meanwhile, Switzerland turned away Jewish refugees.

As a result of the defamation lawsuits resulting from many of the claims made in his books, Ziegler has been fined hundreds of thousands of francs. He also courted controversy through “his association with Muammar Gaddafi” (45) (the Libyan dictator whom Ziegler later disavowed) and his defense of Communism in Cuba. At the time of Abrahamian’s interview, Ziegler was 90 years old, but still passionate about fighting capitalist corruption. Abrahamian notes that interest in scandals like the Panama Papers and changes to Switzerland’s banking regulations to make it more transparent suggest that Ziegler’s work has had an impact, but Ziegler remains skeptical that things will improve. Ziegler told Abrahamian that, ironically enough, the president of Switzerland’s largest private bank, Nicolas Pictet, was his neighbor.

Abrahamian describes the development of the freeport system around the world through the story of a leading contemporary freeport developer, Yves Bouvier. The chapter opens with an anecdote about an Italian customs official who was found in 1995 to have conspired in the theft of antiquities stored in the Geneva Freeport. Freeports are onshore sites where goods are kept without being taxed, subjected to tariffs, or otherwise regulated like a good entering the country. They were first established in Italy in the 16th century and later became essential to European imperial expansion. For instance, the British established freeports in Hong Kong and Shanghai in the 19th century as part of their aggressive entry into Asian markets and territorial holdings. Today, freeports are often used by the ultrawealthy to hold valuables, particularly art, that they do not wish to be taxed.

Bouvier, the Genevese “freeport king,” was a leading figure in marketing freeports to the wealthy as art storage and dealing facilities. In his thirties, he took over his family’s shipping firm, Natural le Coultre, and transformed it into a niche company for the transport and storage of fine art in freeports. In the 2000s, Switzerland began to reform its banking laws to make banks more transparent. Art held in freeports faced less scrutiny and became an increasingly popular way to store wealth. Works could be held in a series of shell companies to obscure ownership; it was easy to launder money through private art sales with high dollar amounts. (Later, Switzerland introduced regulation to crack down on this form of art dealing.)

In 2002, Bouvier began to work as an agent and art dealer for Russian billionaire Yevgenyevich Rybolovlev, who had moved his family and many assets to Geneva after the fall of the USSR. Bouvier acquired 38 works worth approximately $2 billion for Rybolovlev, enriching himself in the process. Bouvier used the money and influence to open a freeport in Singapore in 2010. Singapore, formerly a territory owned by the British East India Company, had positioned itself since independence in 1965 as a business-friendly country. When Switzerland tightened banking regulation, Singapore began to market itself as an alternative, with an emphasis on its secretive, dependable banks. Additionally, unlike Switzerland, Singapore had not signed a UNESCO Convention banning sale of “unlawfully obtained cultural artifacts” (68), making it an ideal location for the freeport. Bouvier likewise worked with accountancy and consulting firm Deloitte to open a freeport in Luxembourg in 2014.

In 2015, Rybolovlev accused Bouvier of artificially inflating the prices at which he sold the artwork acquired on Rybolovlev’s behalf to Rybolovlev. For instance, Bouvier purchased a Modigliani painting for $93.5 million and sold it to Rybolovlev for $118 million. Rybolovlev pursued legal action against Bouvier around the world, leading to Bouvier’s arrest in Monaco and the freezing of his assets. They later reached a settlement and none of the charges ever stuck. The legal fees, however, led to Bouvier selling his stakes in the Geneva, Singapore, and Luxembourg freeports.

In October 2020, Abrahamian attended a book reading by Swiss investigative journalist Antoine Harari, who had been reporting on Bouvier and Rybolovlev’s feud. Bouvier and his lawyers also attended and vigorously defended Bouvier throughout. Later, Abrahamian walked to the Geneva Freeport. She reflects on how freeports act as a “legal fiction”: They are treated by the legal system as if they are not part of a nation’s territory, despite literally being within its borders.