The value of fieldwork, from the discipline of anthropology, comes from being rooted to a specific place for some time.
Second-year Ph.D. student Simon Rakei received funding from the Boyce Family Caribbean Studies Grant to continue his research on how non-sovereign territories in the Caribbean navigate autonomy while functioning as tax havens—offshore financial or banking centers that don’t require foreign individuals to reside in the country or foreign businesses to have operations in the country to receive tax benefits.
Starting in the late 1960s, a number of Caribbean nations pursued becoming tax havens as a deliberate economic development strategy to reduce their dependence on foreign countries and develop and sustain their own economies. Simon traveled to the British Virgin Islands (BVI), a British overseas territory, for four weeks to study the historical and contemporary implications of the International Business Companies (IBC) Act of 1984, a landmark piece of legislation in establishing offshore banking centers in the Caribbean. “I was following the small cast of characters who drafted the IBC Act, looking for interviews. I also visited the House of Assembly, the BVI legislature to look for the minutes of the debates around the legislation [because] I wanted to read how it had been debated at the time,” said Simon.
Simon aims to highlight the consequences for these communities, connecting historical colonial oversight to contemporary economic autonomy. “The question for me is, how do you resolve that tension of being non-sovereign, lacking political independence, while trying to become economically self-reliant, because they have to build schools, run a health department. How do these non-sovereign states achieve that while they are still formal British territories?”
As a joint Ph.D. student in history and anthropology, he emphasized the importance of fieldwork in his research. “The third thing I was trying to do was ethnographic fieldwork. I was there for part of the BVI Emancipation Festival, where they celebrate the abolition of slavery in the British colonies. I also started to establish professional connections within BVI financial centers to further opportunities for my research.”
The work was not without challenges. The records Simon sought were partially destroyed, he was told, by Hurricane Irma in 2017, rendering the archives incomplete. Access to high-profile interviewees required patience, diplomacy, and building a high level of trust. “I would never have been able to schedule or conduct these interviews from afar,” Simon explained.
Braving twisty mountain roads, bureaucratic red tape, and complex closed social networks, Simon’s work illustrates why resources like the Boyce grant, which help students embed themselves in the Caribbean countries they are studying, are so vital: the grant requires that research trips last between two weeks and four months.
“The value of fieldwork, from the discipline of anthropology, comes from being rooted to a specific place for some time. Remote research could never capture the nuance or the human dimension of these stories, nor, really, can a quick visit,” noted Simon.
“I think the Caribbean, especially the Anglophone Caribbean, is often marginalized as a site of academic inquiry,” Simon said. “By encouraging research here, the Boyce grant helps shift the geography of knowledge production to the Caribbean, as sites that can actually produce knowledge with global consequences. And, if we’re talking about the Virgin Islands and offshore finance, these are countries that shape global, international finance—they are at the center of international political economy.”
Read about Paul and Simone Boyce's personal inspiration for establishing the Boyce Family Caribbean Studies Grant.
Read "Voices from the Caribbean," and learn about all three 2025 Boyce Family Caribbean Studies Grant recipients, Ben Kalosa-Kenyon, Maya Sudarkasa, and Simon Rakei.
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