The map of the globe shows the world we think we know: sovereign nations that grant and restrict their citizens’ rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside its neatly delineated borders, however, a parallel universe has been engineered into existence, consisting of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, increasingly for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful.

Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of the hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed the commodity they had – bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Following its evolution around the world, she reveals how prize-winning economists, eccentric theorists, visionary statesmen, and consultants masterminded its export in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centres where immigrants languish in limbo, and charter cities controlled by foreign governments and multinational corporations – and even into outer space, where tiny Luxembourg aspires to mining rights on asteroids.