ABSTRACT
This term emerged as the reciprocal of the notion of orientalism, and sug-
gests a distorted, stereotyped image of Western society, which could be
articulated or implicit, held by people inside and outside the West. Behind
these renderings, which are shaped by political relationships within the
societies in which they exist, is an assumption about how people define
themselves and others. One’s own social unit and the other’s are identified
as contrasting elements that are taken to express essences or crucial distin-
guishing features, such that the resulting characterizations are inevitably
negations of each other. (See also Colonialism; and Identity.)
The spread of global relations has brought some notable shifts in the ways
that capital is accumulated, and the key examples cited for this are offshore
arrangements and transborder corporate alliances. By moving into the
realm of the supraterritorial, or into the cyberspace of electronic finance,
capital is readily able to escape obligations for taxes or other conditions
associated with a particular state jurisdiction, and locate anywhere in the
world that offers a better deal. The attraction of offshore centres is that they
tend to offer minimal rates of corporate, personal, capital gains, with-
holding or any other taxes, while at the same time luring capital in with
limited regulation and statutory guarantees of confidentiality. States have
created offshore zones for both global production processes (see Export
Processing Zones) and global financial activities.