David Attenborough boasts on BBC’s Blue Planet II nature documentary series that the ocean is “the largest habitat on earth” (2017), but points out that it is also the least known. The discoveries made during the Blue Planet II expeditions, of new underwater landscapes and species, and the impact of climate change and pollution, continue a 500-year discourse of Western discovery of the world’s oceans. “Discovered” in the context of Western European colonial exploration, speculation about the Pacific has predominantly consisted of estimations of its content and value within a Western logic of capitalist market economy. While colonial-era seafaring first sparked the “ineluctable pursuit of an unknowable enigma,” a race for resources represented most famously in Ahab’s single-minded hunt for the great white whale in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick,Footnote 1 Attenborough’s quest is to capture on film fantastic images of exotic creatures and places. More than their actual discoveries, both historical and contemporary seafaring feats celebrate Western exceptionalism, an adventuring spirit, and extraordinary technology that uncovers these various hidden riches for reading or viewing pleasure back home. At the same time as the voyages reveal extraordinary bounties, their narrative of awe suggests that much lies outside human knowledge, waiting, it would seem, to be found. At least when it comes to the ocean, the imaginary of the age of discovery is by no means over.

The combination of partial knowledge and heightened speculation figures the Pacific almost exclusively in the realm of the imaginary, an imprecision perhaps best captured in the term “south seas.”Footnote 2 From the beginning of the modern era of globalization under colonial capitalism to today’s neoliberal era, the Pacific exists as a disembodied, virtual, speculative space rather than as a real, living, and lived-in place intimately connected with the rest of the world. Both historical and, as indicated in Attenborough’s discourse, modern representations of an invisible, unknowable south seas ignore the role of the real Pacific. Despite covering over 30% of the earth’s surface, generating nearly half the planet’s oxygen, and playing a crucial role in balancing the global ecosystem, the familiar terms of geopolitics such as “trans-Pacific,” “Asia-Pacific,” and “Australasia” pass over the Pacific as if it were, as Epeli Hau‘ofa jokes, “the hole in the doughnut” (2008, 37). Unlike the colonized spaces that border the great ocean, and which were absorbed into key financial production and consumption nodes in the flows of globalization, particularly the Americas, Australia, South-East and East Asia,Footnote 3 the speculative function of the Pacific Ocean and its islands has never given way to more embodied, realistic modes of engagement. The absence of the Pacific in global discourse underlines the land-centric biases of cultural representation, which tend to relegate all maritime regions to blank spaces on the map, an emptiness only to be traversed—a gap that this essay collection endeavors to fill.

Despite increasing knowledge of Pacific precarity, such as issues of pollution and climate change foregrounded in Blue Planet II and the significant body of Pacific cultural output and environmental activism,Footnote 4 the colonial-era origins of the south seas as virtual space on which to project desires of fantastic(al) wealth reveal foundations of capitalist values that remain entrenched today. The disembodied “neverwhere”Footnote 5 of the south seas is not an oversight but a central conceit integral to capitalist growth and profit. From the 1711 founding of the South Seas Company to today’s island Offshore Financial Centers and tax havens, the imprecise elsewhere generates speculation and profit-seeking of money that nonetheless only circulates within elites in developed-world centers such as London and New York.

Taboo, the 2017 BBC television drama about trade and settlement during the British Empire, is a useful lens through which to analyze both past and present representations of the south seas. Set in London in 1814, the story centers on political wrangling between the Crown, the East India Company, and a renegade sailor, James Delaney, who owns the title for Nootka Sound, a small island off the Pacific coast between the U.S. and Canada. The island is of strategic importance to both Crown and Company as a potential trans-Pacific trading port for Canadian furs and Chinese tea, and Delaney’s refusal to hand over his claim invokes underhand, violent, and corrupt practices by both powers to force his acquiescence. The narrative harks back to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century founding of the British stock market, insurance trade, and mercantile colonialism, including slavery and land conquest. As a modern-day representation of the past, the period drama can also be read from a contemporary understanding of the south seas.Footnote 6 In particular, the revelations of the Panama Papers (2015) and Paradise Papers (2017) provide a fitting context within which to interpret Taboo’s layers of wealth and hidden interest, the unpacking of which drives the plot.

While Delaney may be interpreted as an ambivalent kind of returned Robinson Crusoe, Taboo is in no way an exotic adventure story. Neither is the show interested in the material imports with which the era was preoccupied. As with the slavery that is hinted at but never engaged, the trade goods from which Delaney’s, the Crown’s, and the East India Company’s power and wealth are derived are relegated to background presences and decorative screen sets. Opulent rooms and offices, filled with chinoiserie porcelain, silver pots of tea and coffee, oranges, ivory trinkets, exotic skins, and silk, stand in for the south seas as metonymies of presence, but they are silent and inactive: where they come from and how they arrived there are never mentioned. Rather, the show’s resolute focus on exposing the financial posturing of profit-seeking colonial interests of the East India Company, the Crown, and private speculators, including Delaney, reveals the financial incentives of Empire. Exposing greed, excessive risk-taking, gambling with other people’s money, false advertising of corporate interests, political and corporate corruption, and multiple amoral and illegal acts in the name of wealth accumulation, Taboo enacts a historical version of the same kind of rapacious business practices that have, since the 2008 financial crisis, gained mainstream popularity in visual media.Footnote 7 Ultimately, the “taboo” of the series’ title enacts and re-enacts the invisibility of finance, of the perpetual failure to link London’s extraordinary wealth with the inequality, illegality, and injustice—both at home and abroad, past and present—on which it is based. Like the City of London’s banking industry’s illegal, predatory practices that significantly contributed to the 2008 global financial crisis, and the hidden wealth that continues to circulate despite the revelations of the Panama and Paradise Papers, all exposure attempts have been silently buried. Taboo thus exemplifies the south seas as a metaphor for invisible finance, contributing to an enduring Western understanding of the Pacific as a blank surface on the map on which to project desires for personal adventure and financial venture, against which no postcolonial, indigenous, environmental, or alternative activism, policy, or law has yet made significant inroads.

In 1711, when the South Sea Company was founded, the most recent map of the world, by Heinrich Scherer (1703), fills the northern hemisphere with detailed coastlines, lakes, rivers, and mountain chains, leaving little surface of the map unadorned. The entire bottom half of the globe, however, between the continents of America and Africa, is a void. Lacking landmasses, Scherer fills the space with figures of sailing ships, dolphins, and sea monsters. The early joint-stock company that invented debt financing and caused the nation’s first stock bubble was thus founded on an anticipated market that was not yet even on the map. This notable cartographical absence is only one of the venture’s many layers of speculation lacking in any material grounding. Certainly, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British exploration, conquest, and settlement of the Atlantic and Pacific took place in a physical environment of restricted mobility and communication. It is therefore understandable that early references to the south seas feature more metaphorically than literally, such as in the discourse surrounding the South Sea Company and stock market bubble (1711–1721). In both its newness and imaginative flair, the novelty of the South Sea investment scheme captured the public imagination, almost as if the lack of material basis was compensated by an excess in the realm of the imaginary. The scheme appealed to investors buoyed by the optimism of the burgeoning age of Empire and excited by an emerging new concept of economics based on the imagined values of debt and fiat money.

The reduction of the Pacific to the imagery of the south seas construes the great southern ocean as an abstract Other to the continents on which concepts of the West are grounded. The slipperiness of the geographical space referred to by the term is here symptomatic. For the eighteenth-century South Sea Company, the south seas referenced trans-Atlantic trade with the Caribbean and South America. Today the term generally refers spatially to the Southern hemisphere area of Oceania, or sometimes to the entire Pacific, in order to include Hawai‘i. In a similar dynamic to Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, the south seas connotes an exoticized space of Romantic Other, a myth perpetuated in early European narratives, such as James Cook’s journals of Hawai‘i, Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters from Samoa (see Stevenson [1908] 2009 and [1899] 1995), and Paul Gauguin’s paintings of Tahiti, a discourse that, since the twentieth century, has been taken up by Western mass tourism to the islands.Footnote 8

Symptomatic of these confusing conflations between past and present, real and imaginary, Atlantic and Pacific, colonial and tourist, in 1966 Chile renamed a small island off its Pacific coast Robinson Crusoe Island. Although Defoe’s south-seas adventure is, like the South Sea Company’s slave route to Central America, one of trans-Atlantic voyaging, the real-life shipwreck of Scottish privateer Alexander Selkirk, on which Defoe is said to have based his tale, takes place on this Pacific Island (Richetti 2005, 175). Chile’s renaming in order to attract more tourism to the area suggests the power of the fiction of the south seas to such an extent as to shift Defoe’s fictional Atlantic to the Pacific, thereby subordinating the real for the imaginary by replacing the historical Selkirk with the fictional Crusoe. Failure to differentiate between these two great bodies of water illustrates the longevity of the historical conflation, despite the fact that the oceans and their islands are now thoroughly mapped, unlike in Scherer’s time.

As predominantly imaginary and new, the concept of financial speculation was very much shaped by its representations in print media. The South Sea Company, and the colonial enterprise more broadly, in the words of Carl Wennerlind, “relied on the public’s favourable assessment of a world very few had experienced or witnessed in person” (2011, 205). Thus propaganda writers such as Treasury pamphleteers Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift “had to offer partly fictional accounts that allowed people to imagine the conditions and opportunities” (206). The south seas, then, was explicitly imagined into existence long before it was explored, charted, and mapped. In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and Polly (1729), the notion of the south seas adventure quickly entered into literary circulation (Defoe 1719; Gay [1729] 1922; Swift [1726] 2003). These early novels and dramas were written in direct response to the South Sea Bubble, which is referenced in the fiction’s harnessing of the term “adventurer,” which in the eighteenth-century referred to a stock-market speculator (Balen 2002, 16), to seafaring adventure figures of Crusoe, Gulliver, and Gay’s Caribbean pirates. In their literary texts, Defoe, Swift, and Gay all allude to the changing terrain of economic, political, and social concepts of finance revealed by the South Sea Company, often in satire that exposes the fiction of speculative finance and thus voices early critique of the emergent capitalist world-system. Writing in the new literary form of the novel, both Defoe’s and Swift’s speculative fictions also demonstrate the concomitant and related birth of the modern economy and literary fiction, two discourses that had not yet crystallized into separate spheres.Footnote 9

Defoe, Swift, and Gay write for an English readership and audience, with the south seas settings functioning in each text as little more than a catalyst for distanced reflection on English society. Having themselves never traveled beyond England, and in Swift’s case also Ireland, the writers’ own involvement in the Atlantic trade were akin to that of their intended readers: upper- and emerging middle-class men who were also investors in the speculative adventures proliferating in the rapidly growing stock market. Indeed, Swift and Gay both lost significant fortunes in the South Sea Bubble. Defoe, in Robinson Crusoe, asks readers to identify with the narrator and thus to imagine themselves at sea and in exotic places, gambling with significant risk to their lives and livelihoods. Like investors who—both then and now—closely follow stock data and market mechanics with little interest in the concrete business and location of their investments, Defoe dedicates more space to explaining financial concepts, such as returns on sugarcane investment (1719, 24; 178–179) and the legal process of making long-distance transfer of funds (180–181), than he does on describing Crusoe’s voyage and location, revealed at the end of the adventure as somewhere between Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago (138).

Defoe’s novel, published before the 1721 South Sea stock crash, remains positive about the financial innovations inspired by growing colonial interests. By contrast, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels invents a ridiculous fantasy mode as a way of condemning through satire British economic beliefs and values as similarly far-fetched fictions. The speculative terrain of Swift’s south seas covers the entire surface area of the Pacific, as the writer locates Lilliput in Melanesia, between Sumatra and Australia, maps Brobdingnag as a peninsula on the U.S. Northwest coast, and the coordinates he gives for Laputa situate it somewhere in the North Pacific near the Aleut Islands ([1726] 1993, 285, n. 4). The non-specific maritime everywhere of the colonial enterprise, typically represented by the ocean-going ship, is in Gulliver’s Travels taken to its furthest extreme in the floating island of Laputa. An allegorical heart of Empire, the floating island of Laputa, a dysphemism standing for England, is literally untethered from place, and thus able to cast its shadow anywhere.

The allegory of Laputa as critique of colonial dominion might be expected to have ended with the dismantling of Empire; however, decolonization did not untether the south seas from its colonial masters. The 1960s invention of offshore finance centers and tax-haven jurisdictions allowed floating finance to take Empire’s place, in what Anthony van Fossen calls “a sort of invisible empire of tax havens in present and past British territories” (van Fossen 2015, 161). Set up during decolonization by Britain’s global administrative networks, including London lawyers and the Bank of England (161–162), offshore tax havens are the modern-day Laputa that enable the wealthy West to continue to profit from postcolonial sovereign states. Just like the vague neverwhere of the South Seas trading company and Defoe’s and Swift’s adventures, it is today almost impossible to locate money hidden offshore. Of course the tax haven islands themselves do exist on the map, but there are no records of financial ownership and transactions. Nested in nameless shell corporations that do not name the company owners or directors, funds move around the world seeking maximum profit, for example, using Swiss Francs in a company listed in Turks and Caicos to invest in a Cook Island-based online gambling company (van Fossen 2003, 10). Movement is, in the digital age, virtual, and sometimes even fictional, in the way that multiple companies registered on different islands can trade with each other as if in a free-market without revealing that they all actually belong to one beneficial owner. Just as in the eighteenth-century fiction, maritime metaphors abound in contemporary nonfictional portrayals of finance imagined as transactions between an onshore center, usually London or New York, and an offshore destination in the Atlantic or Pacific, money “flowing ceaselessly”: “waves of liquid capital” that “wash away” laws and regulations (Bullough 2018, 29). For example, in his post-Paradise Papers treatise in favor of greater financial regulation, Moneyland, Oliver Bullough works with an extended metaphor of global finance as an oil tanker, in which the liquid wealth of oil can “slosh backwards and forwards in ever greater waves” (28), leaking, pooling, floating, and polluting the real-world ecosystem with impunity.

The speculative finance industry today accounts for a significant and growing portion of the global economy (Greenwood and Scharfstein 2013, 3–28), yet remains as mysterious in its working as it did to many investors in the eighteenth century. Indeed, the non-location of the South Sea Company’s purported source of wealth finds its most recent iteration in the 2017 Paradise Papers’ revelation of the “CV” corporate model by which major corporations are no longer even registered in the offshore tax havens that have been a source of wealth since colonial occupation, but are not resident in any country at all. Today’s global finance acts with a disregard for the specificities of place similar to the South Sea investment scheme and its non-existent business on which investors gambled without ever leaving London. Bullough, in his study of “moneyland,” redraws the world map according to the places where the global elite earn (or steal) their wealth, where they hide it, and where they spend it. Following the money in effect effaces the geography and national borders that usually define maps: “These countries are different in language, culture, religion and almost everything else, but if you look at them from the perspective of money, such distinctions vanish” (23). The fictional space of the south seas is again suggested, as the offshores of Jersey, the Caribbean, and the Pacific all function by the same logic.Footnote 10

It is striking that in the 300 years from the earliest form of financial market capitalism to that of twenty-first-century late-capitalism, the south seas continue to figure so prominently in the virtual movement of money in financial trading. The offshore tax havens and their even further disembodied CV variants are the south seas of today: conveniently vague, largely undefined virtual spaces that represent the ideals of global flows and networks as a mask for usefully obfuscating the way money actually only circulates within elite circles, predominantly earning profit for its owners by doing nothing: virtual money invested in virtual shares. As Defoe, Swift, and Gay argued in relation to the South Sea Company, such finance is nothing but fiction. Eighteenth-century literary representations of the south seas encoded the term as a metonymy for both any unknown maritime space and for undefined financial speculations. Each in their own way, the Paradise Papers, Blue Planet II, and Taboo, which all came out of the UK in 2017, offer multi-modal confirmation of the power of the metaphoric, symbolic, and unimaginable fantasy of the south seas, that remains steadfastly unattached to any specific place, or to its local inhabitants and cultures, which do not feature in any of them.

A reading of the Taboo series’ title reveals a set of imagery that, like that of the south seas, is confusing and stylized rather than specifically located. The word “taboo,” common to most Polynesian languages meaning “sacred” or “forbidden,” forges an imaginative link between London and the Pacific: between British Delaney and Pacific peoples. The concept of taboo, which was brought into the English language by Captain James Cook from his Pacific voyages for the British Crown, gestures toward a trans-Pacific drama. However, the only indication of Polynesia is an actor with a Maori facial moko tattoo, who plays a character referred to as “the heathen” in the dialogue and as “the Hawaiian” in the transcript (episode 3). In the opening credits, the main characters—all white Britons who live in London—are suspended in clear blue water, as if drowning, along with the title in solid black letters in which the final two letters “o—o” are held apart by a bar that could be stylized stocks or shackles. The body of water here suggested is perhaps not the Pacific but rather the Atlantic of the slave-trading era, a collapsing of signifiers reminiscent of eighteenth-century constructions of the south seas as indeterminate. The meaning of the water imagery and choice of title are never clarified in the course of the eight episodes. The only water that features in the storyline is the filthy Thames, particularly its mudflats, riverbanks, and jetties, where much of the action takes place. Although Delaney is often portrayed washing himself in the river, he never wades out of his depth, thereby failing to connect with the imagery of floating, swimming, or sinking that the opening credits suggest are of thematic and symbolic importance.

The symbolic as well as real fluidity of Taboo’s water imagery make sense when read within historical constructions of finance and Empire. Imperial trade applied hierarchical power dynamics to the globally interconnected bodies of water, imagining the Thames as the heart of Empire to which both Atlantic and Pacific are annexed by mercantilism and colonialism. Defoe’s oft-cited Treasury pamphlet of 1710, which expounds the newly invented concept of finance credit, is an early expression of this representation of multiple forms of fluid connectivity: “[credit] gives Being to the Branches and Moisture to the Root; ‘tis the Oil of the Wheel, the Marrow in the Bones, the Blood in the Veins, and the Spirits in the Heart of all the Negoce, Trade, Cash, and Commerce in the World.”Footnote 11 Today’s global finance, while more abstracted, shares these dynamics of power radiating out from the City of London, which controls the largest single share of the global financial market (37% in 2017; “Key Facts” 2017).

If the story’s taboo is not Polynesian, it may still be of Pacific origin in that Delaney’s mother was a Native American woman whom his father “bought for beads” and a treaty for ownership of her tribal land of Nootka Island (episode 5).Footnote 12 The storyline of the “civilized savage” on show in London is familiar from the early-seventeenth century, when the Native American Pocahontas died at Gravesend, opposite the Tilbury Docks where Taboo is set. Delaney’s mother dies in Bedlam Insane Asylum, committed by her husband after she is unable or unwilling to pass as a Spanish noblewoman. The mother figure appears to Delaney only in menacing and haunting dreams and visions that suggest a mystical connection with the spirit world. This representation of indigeneity as spiritual Other is fully inscribed in a desultory Eurocentric mode that, in the best case exoticizes the inhabitants of the south seas and in the worst case utterly subsumes them to their use-value in capitalist terms—here for her inheritance.

It is, indeed, another kind of haunting that alludes to the final possible connection with the south seas, in Delaney’s traumatic memories of a sinking slave ship. A child cadet in the East India Company army, Delaney as a sick young man is conscripted to a slaver which is deliberately sunk in order to recuperate the insurance money. The haunting legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade resonates economically with the South Sea Company’s founding premise on an anticipated share in the Spanish slave trade. In its recurring visual imagery of black hands grasping toward Delaney as the ship sinks, it is also reminiscent of J.M.W. Turner’s famous maritime painting “The Slave Ship” (1840), which Marina Warner analyzes as “suggest[ing] a crime and cannot bring himself to name it” (Warner 1994, 2). The painting’s full title, “Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying—Typhon [sic.] coming on” and its epigraph, “Hope, hope, fallacious hope, where is thy market now?” construct the viewer as in collusion with the British, empathizing and sympathizing with the unfortunate slavers who not only risk losing their lives in the oncoming storm but must also abandon their profit overboard. This uncomfortable complicity is re-created in these scenes in Taboo, shot through Delaney’s point of view. Significant modern scholarship works to recall to public memory the lives lost in the slave trade, culturally in work such as by Paul Gilroy, and economically in the “Legacies of British Slave-ownership” project.Footnote 13 By contrast, this 2017 period drama engages with slavery in a way that recalls the emptiness of Turner’s sea, full only with European ships and sea monsters, which in turn recalls the blank southern space of Scherer’s 1703 map.

Taboo thus mixes up colonial-era atrocities so that colonial wealth from the North American Pacific island and those from trans-Atlantic mercantilism occupy the same story line, with no clear distinction made between the conquest of indigenous peoples and the African slave trade. Certainly, the plot which follows Delaney’s uncovering of both his father’s stolen land and the East India Company’s atrocities in the name of profit may be read as breaking taboos surrounding colonial capitalism. However, as none of the potential south seas storylines are fleshed out, the title, finally, carries less weight than expected, merely suggesting that what is taboo is the outright naming and shaming of the rapacious practices that underpin colonialism, which dispossessed indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and used and dispensed with an untold number of lower-class British subjects, including Delaney the former ship-boy and the children, seamen, boat builders, and dock workers on whose labor the movement of goods in and out of London relied. In its vague, visually absent portrayal of maritime spaces and non-European peoples, the series collapses together multiple forms of British exploitation on which the wealth of the nation is today founded.

Taboo does not only recall colonial capitalist practices of wealth creation and its incriminatory impact on the people it used and abused. The series explores multiple forms of hidden and stolen wealth that, in the wake of the Panama and Paradise Papers, draw attention to today’s forms of wealth circulating through and between offshore havens and onshore centers. As Bullough enumerates in Moneyland, cash, commodities, jewelry, ethnographic and fine art, boats, property, citizenship, trust funds, and even diplomatic immunity are all traded in the ceaseless cycling of wealth. In Taboo, London, the central hub of Empire, and more particularly its maritime conduit, the Thames, connects to Africa, the Caribbean, and Pacific Northwest America. Delaney funds his London life with uncut diamonds the audience assumes come from his time in Africa.Footnote 14 He offers no explanation of their provenance, and no buyer asks—a problem of relevance today in the blood diamond trade. Ownership disputed between Delaney, the Crown, the East India Company, and American Republicans over Nootka Island centers on their own projected benefits from its strategic importance, access to trans-Pacific trade with China, and natural resources, without any mention of the civilizing mission veneer usually invoked as excuse for colonial exploitation. Despite what the audience might assume as an affective connection with his mother’s Indigenous kin, Delaney’s only ambition for Nootka is expressed in cold negotiation for the best business deal possible: “I will cede sovereignty of Nootka Sound to whichever nation offers me their monopoly on the trade of furs for tea from Fort George to Canton. A monopoly. That’s what I want” (episode 3). For this purpose, he registers in London the Delaney Nootka Trading Company, thereby asserting a property right to the island from which he cannot be legally excluded by any government—even though he has never been there. This strategy of citizenship by investment, often in absentia and potentially using illegally gained funds,Footnote 15 is much contested today in allowing super-rich individuals, particularly from ex-Soviet, Middle Eastern, and African nations, to buy a residency passport in countries such as Britain,Footnote 16 Ireland, and Australia, and direct citizenship in most island tax havens, the majority of which are Commonwealth nations with direct access to the UK.

The colonial trading ship is the most concrete example of global transactions with multiple embedded and concealed interests that today take place only as a paper trail or as electronic transactions among offshore investors, owners, and traders. Although by the nineteenth century the East India Company no longer traded in slaves, Taboo’s narrative insists on continuing multi-stage trading routes that involve chartering a Company ship to North African subcontractors who trade slaves under a different ship name through Spanish privateers, who sell them on to British Caribbean sugar plantations, such as the East India Company director’s family plantation in Antigua (episode 2). As the Abolitionist character, Chichester, claims in the later investigation of the willful sinking of the ship holding slaves, that was registered as leaving Angola empty, “these slaves were loaded by East India Company directors anyway. As part of a thriving illicit network. It was done for personal profit” (episode 6). The convoluted chain of command that makes it hard to ascertain the invested stakeholders eventually leads to the East India Company director himself. Such obfuscation of the beneficial owners is familiar in the embedded structure of today’s shell companies, in which an owner can hide their identity behind multiple company names each headed by different nominated directors and registered across several offshore jurisdictions. Just as the Crown in Taboo is frustrated at not being able to pin on the East India Company the crimes, double dealing and embezzlement it is sure is practiced, modern government, and law, is in most cases powerless to uncover illegal financial practices because of offshore secrecy.Footnote 17 Taboo’s portrayal of boat subcontracting and renaming is also a modern phenomenon, with flags of convenience generating significant revenue for offshore tax havens. This enables pleasure crafts of the super-rich and commercial fishing vessels to travel the world, like Laputa, floating jurisdictions beholden only to the lower labor, safety, and environmental laws of their country of registration. Van Fossen’s examples of labor abuse and illegal fishing on an American-owned, Vanuatu-registered fishing boat crewed by Ecuadorians hired by a labor contractor in Panama, or malnutrition and non-payment of Filipino workers aboard a Japanese-owned, Vanuatu-registered transporter illustrate cases of modern-day slavery that echo their historical precedents (2015, 175–176).

In Taboo, the director’s rejoinder that slavery is, in 1814, of itself not illegal (episode 6), is not only ethically hollow but also masks the other, illegal aspects of the trade exposed in the series. Similarly, today’s official legality of offshores and tax havens euphemizes real crimes happening within the structure, such as tax evasion, embezzlement, fraud, the purchase of arms and drugs, and money laundering. When Delaney chastises his lawyer for failing to take a stance against the manipulating monopoly of the East India Company, Thoyt replies:

the East India was a trading company. Now it is God Almighty. The Prince Regent fears it. No Government in the world dare stand up to it. It owns the land, the ocean, the fucking sky above our heads. … You think all who submit are evil? No. We are submitting to the way the world has become. (Episode 2)

Nature, commerce, and the Crown are here subsumed to the dictates of the Company. As economic historian Nick Robins argues, with the clarity of hindsight post-2008 financial crisis, the East India Company was the forerunner of the modern multinational and the original “too big to fail” corporation (Robins 2013). Thoyt’s perceived sense of powerlessness in the face of commerce expresses belief in the supremacy of global capitalism that, although a little hasty in the early 1800s, is certainly widely held today. While the Crown progressively revoked the East India Company’s powers throughout the nineteenth century, finally nationalizing it in 1858, neoliberal-era scandals, most notably the 2008 financial crisis but also the Panama and Paradise Papers, were met with generally tepid governmental responses. The inability, to date, for international cooperation against tax havens from which each nation simultaneously loses (in lost taxes) and wins (many politicians themselves own offshore accounts, as the Papers reveal), demonstrates conflicting attitudes to free-market globalization that struggles to encompass capitalism’s contradictions. Taboo’s dramatization of the illegal and unethical practices of big business and government in the colonial era are mirrored by the Paradise Papers’ revelations of tax evasion, including by the Queen of England, and by British state pension funds. That the Queen safeguards the fortune she inherited from the state is defended as legal and therefore financial common sense. The varied responses to the perceived injustice of south seas profit, in Gay’s satirical plays, Taboo’s foppish Prince Regent, and the current lack of media debate about the ethics of, for example, the Queen’s offshore funds, indicate the unclear legality that vacillates between celebrating, tolerating, or outlawing offshore wealth.

The East India Company, Britain’s first joint-stock company and model for later public-trading companies, including the South Sea Company one century later, dominated politics and finance for 250 years. And yet it is barely remembered in popular British history. No landmarks or residues of its power are visible today, with its wealth, assets, and properties absorbed into later British corporations and personal empires. Again, the South Sea Bubble provides a useful historical precedent. Despite flagging the constellation of political, economic, and social changes that mark the beginning of modern capitalism,Footnote 18 the role of the South Sea Company and its crash in shaping national identity is today all but forgotten. Its cultural impact in the writings of Defoe, Swift, and Gay has also been relegated to the obscurity of footnotes, even though Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, and to a lesser extent The Beggar’s Opera are foundational to the English literary canon. Such invisibility speaks to the place of finance in public memory, willfully ignored or forgotten to such an extent that the cyclical economic booms and busts are each time experienced and represented anew, with shock and incredulity. For Robins, forgetting the instrumental role of the East India Company in the development of the modern economy fosters an erroneous “sense that the current era of business dominance is somehow unique” (2006, 79). Contemporary concern over the wealth of the global elite, known as “the 1%,” the predatory, monopolistic practices of some multinational companies, and the offshore possibilities still located in the south seas that enable them to consolidate their power, suggests more continuity than change.

As a period drama about the East India Company, a forgotten historical British pillar of power, Taboo is inscribed in current postcolonial efforts to rectify the historical lacunae, elisions, and omissions of Britain’s economic history. Setting Taboo between the coffee houses and East India House in the nascent financial district, the City of London, and the East India Docks of Canary Wharf, accurately locates the site of wealth and power of both the colonial Empire and today’s neoliberal British economy, which still spans both locations, since the 1980s transformation of Docklands into financial service hub for banking and stock trading. It might, indeed, be most accurate to locate the imagined south seas in the streets of London itself: Leadenhall Street, site of East India House, Lloyd’s Insurance, and the Royal Exchange; and the many alleyways around Docklands which still bear the names of their trade: New Brunswick Quay, Jamestown Way, Saffron Ave, Manilla Street, Calcutta Road.

Taboo offers the impression of confronting uncomfortable truths about the exploitation on which modern British wealth and power is based. Purportedly about one man’s and one nation’s relationship with the world, Taboo, like the eighteenth-century fiction and drama analyzed above, is uninterested in entering into dialogue with or exploring its dependence on the maritime space on which its various plots depend. All fictions analyzed in this paper lack any sense of the connective currents that join all bodies of water, including the Thames as a conduit to the rest of the world. The construction of the south seas as an invisible elsewhere reveals a necessary condition of capitalism: as long as an ineluctable wide-open space remains, there is still room for expansion. As a non-space, it remains a rich site for speculative investment and concealment based on the imaginary, which projects further growth through untapped natural resources and virtual fortunes that circumnavigate the world in currency and stock trading, residing out of sight in unlisted bank accounts. The way cultural narratives allow Western viewers and readers to ignore their own connectivity to the Pacific reveals a deeper contradiction underpinning the Western relationship to the material world at large, one that renders the global powers unwilling and/or incapable of reacting to the need to change the global economy from growth to sustainability, and from a focus on abstract financial to material natural resources as the foundation for a global common wealth. Looking back to the past and showing just how tenacious the myth of the south seas remains today indicates just how hard it will be to change the mindset.