Caravanserai
The Uses of Islands in the Capitalist World-System
Marina Karides
July 1st 2026
Islands appear to have stirred the global contemporary zeitgeist. Pacific Islanders who have been
tending to the dangers and disappearance of their homelands by sea level rise for decades have
gained international attention. More recent is the preoccupation with Kharg island, Iran’s port for
crude oil export. “Kharg Island Obliterated” was the headline of a White House social media
post dismissing, as often occurs, island worlds, in this case people with livelihoods and an
ancient autochthonous population.
Trump’s imperialism manifests in his preoccupation with islands. It is evinced by his relentless
pursuit to acquire Greenland and his obsession with the Chagos Islands, especially Diego Garcia,
where a US run military facility sits (BBC 2026). In addition, Trump has requested $152 million
to reopen Alcatraz as a maximum security prison continuing the penal use of islands.
On a positive note, Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl LX Halftime Show in February
2026 displayed the beauty of island relationality through music, dance, and representational
gestures of tight communities. It showcased the resistance of an island and its diaspora to the
impact of coloniality including: the archipelago’s liminal political and legal status as an
unincorporated territory; US military presence on the island of Vieques (Velázquez 2025); and
most recently, despite tremendous protest, a tax law change (Act 60) in 2019 to attract foreign
residents.
And then there is Little St. James Island, of which the toxicity, containment, and violence by rich
men and sexual crimes against girls and young women are being slowly and painfully unpeeled
for public consumption. This essay is mostly centered on Little St. James, one of the US Virgin
Islands (USVI), which is both an unincorporated territory of the US and a tax haven. The Dutch
held the island in an acutely miserable plantation system leading to revolts which halted slavery
on the islands. The Danish West Indies were renamed the US Virgin Islands (sadly an ode to
Columbus’ nomenclature) when purchased by the US during WWI to protect the Panama Canal.
Military bases were installed during WWII and the Virgin Island National Guard (VING),
recently exposed for systemic predatory sexual abuse of women recruits, is the present military
body.
The next section outlines island feminisms, which I mark as a world-systems, post-colonial,
Indigenous, and Black feminist informed perspective. I then seek to historicize the context of the
group of mostly elite and wealthy men that collected on St. James Island to consume girls and
young women. I draw from past examples to make a thematic presentation of the intersection of
islands, sexual exploitation, and the expansion of the world-system. I consider how subterfuge
and secrecy are embedded in capitalism and how the island serves as an opportune repository.
Lastly, I unpack the case filed by the US Virgin Islands against the Epstein Estate showcasing
the centrality of a global capitalist network and the sexual commodification of girls and young
women. Effectively led by the USVI Attorney General (AG) Denise George, I address her legal
pursuit and political risk as an act of island feminist praxis (Rodríguez-Coss 2020).
Island Feminisms: A World-Systems Perspective
My long time thinking on islands began in Trinidad and Tobago (Karides 2010) applying world-
systems, intersectional, and postcolonial perspectives on street vending and micro-enterprise
development. I conducted a similar study in the Republic of Cyprus (Karides 2008). Then in
Lesvos, Greece (Karides 2021) I considered how Ancient Greek gendered socio-economic
structures, expectations of hospitality, and the Ottoman Empire influenced contemporary lesbian
place making, women’s cooperatives, and convivial economies on the island. Most recently, I
worked with a team researching faculty employment, gender equity, diversity, and inclusion, and
economic survival on island campuses that also seek to become Native Hawaiian places of
learning (Karides, et. al. 2020, Rita and Karides 2022).
Through this research, I arrived to island feminisms (Karides 32:2017):
Island feminism refers to the intellectual sensibilities of island place and constructs of gender
and sexuality as intertwining forces that contour the particular conditions of life – economic,
geographical, and ecological – and cultural and political manifestations on islands. Like most
feminisms, it is action oriented, in pursuit of just and fair conditions for all beings, but is guided
by specific interest in islanders’ local and subaltern strategies that remain resistant to hegemonic
discourses and practices of power.
By introducing island feminisms I sought to highlight that: the social hierarchies within islands
are vulnerable to racist and misogynistic histories of dislocation, genocide, and settlement; the
spatial physicality of islands is used as container for capital’s expansion and expression; and
autochthonous and Indigenous islanders are resisting these impacts by sustaining intimate
communities of care which include their physical environments. As a feminist, anti-capitalist,
anti-racist, critical understanding of islands, archipelagos, and oceans, I distinguish island
feminisms from island studies which I consider a mainstream approach to the study of islands
(see a recent review of the field by Foley, et al. 2023).
I pinpoint the original intrigue to study islands sociologically or through a human geographic
lens to Epeli Hauʻofa’s (1994) eloquent and influential essay “Our Sea of Islands.” Hauʻofa
(1994) reframes the Pacific Islands as Oceania, shifting the dependency framing of this region
and characterization of islands as isolated to a regionally grounded understanding of oceanic
connectivity and the reciprocal relations across the Pacific archipelagos and their diaspora.
Counter to neoliberalism’s single strategy solution to economic development, Hau’ofa (19940
inspired the study of islands on their own terms and not in comparison or dependent on
continental spaces and logics.
Regional approaches to the study of islands have predominated, most notably in the Pacific and
the Caribbean, but also islands as grouped in the Arctic, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, or the
South China Sea, addressing distinct histories and presenting varied forms of feminisms. By
going beyond the region, ocean, or archipelago to recognize islands as nodes and launching
points of the capitalist world system and in relation to each other, island feminisms adds a
“pewsy” and critical island perspective.
A Geopolitics of Sex and Island Place
The structure of sexual violence on islands is connected to the expansion of the capitalist world-
system. It includes the unsolicited arrival and returns in the late 1700s of Captain James Cook
and hundreds of his predatory Royal Navy sailors to the Pacific. The soldiers committing rape,
abusing women, and spreading disease, while Cook unabashedly claimed islands (Hawaiʻi as the
Sandwich Islands, Aoteaora as New Zealand) for the British empire (Hall 2009). In the
Caribbean, arguably the first expression of globalization (Hall 1990) initiates with the vile and
excessive violence driven by Christoper Columbus. Documented by Bartolomé de las Casas, this
included the rape of young girls, rampant dismemberment of bodies as punishment, and
Indigenous genocide, destroying a peaceful maritime world-system in fifty years.
Whether as captains, cooks, sailors or botanists, the men who joined these oceanic journeys set
sail with an unquestioned sense of racial and cultural superiority and deep-seated ideas of the
subordinate location of women. Their engagements with women were differentiated by class,
race, or nation, but also geographies. The island, being on or from an island and the island itself
is an axis of social inequality that intersects with race, class, gender, etc.
Across the globe—Vieques, USVI, Guahan, Philippines, Okinawa—the island-focused
expansion of US military bases arrives with numerous and regular instances of sexual violence
(Rios 2023) shaped by and shaping continental ideologies of island women. Just over 20 percent
of approximately 860 US military bases are on islands. A far off second to the US in the
operation of foreign military bases is the UK with 118 of which 30 percent are on islands. The
sexual violence associated with military presence on islands has been well-documented through
feminist scholarship. Though not focused solely on islands, Enloe’s (1990) Bananas, Beaches,
and Bases was an influential sociological contribution on how to blend feminism with political
economic analysis. Enloe (1990) reframes the radical feminist sentiment “the personal is
political” (Hanisch 1969) by exploring how the “personal is international” and that the
“international is personal” (1990:195). She argued that an understanding of military bases
requires “looking at the seemingly normal, routine, and everyday interactions that take place on
and around these installations (Enloe, Lacey, and Gregory 4: 2016). Given their geographic
scope, size of populations, and continental bias of islanders, the impact of the military is
intensified on islands.
A Body of Land Exploited
Securing islands and the sexual violence this imposes is tied to purposing them for economic
gain–first via colonization, then through postcolonial relations. The plantation became a
signature formation of capitalist expansion (McKittrick 2006), the form moving from island to
island across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Agricultural plantations were replaced in many
insular spaces with the construction of mammoth entities for tourism, hotels and resorts, still
governed by the logic of the plantation and presenting another source of extractive wealth
accumulation.
Yet islands also have proven economically strategic for sustaining the global circuit of goods,
providing safe harbor, and securing geopolitical interests—continental shores just do not oblige
the same way. Islands serve as transshipment hubs in the maritime transportation network
(Verschuur, Koks, and Hall 2022). In their novel research that seeks to connect “the structure of
the global economy and the bottom up representation of the transportation network used to
facilitate this economic structure,” Verschuur, Koks, and Hall (2022) find that fifty percent of
global trade in value terms is maritime, with small islands being up to two times more reliant on
their ports. For Small Island Developing States (SIDS), over 80 percent of imports and exports
arrive or depart through their maritime structures. While essential to island economies, ports that
are critical domestically and serve global supply chains are also primarily found on islands. That
waterways control the global economy became exceedingly evident by the struggle in the Strait
of Hormuz.
Another example of islands appropriated as hubs for capital gain is the extensive establishment
of off-shore financial centers on them. As a strategy of economic development that evolved with
neoliberal financial deregulation in the 1980s, island governments changed tax laws. Peppered
throughout the Caribbean, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, many small island economies have
become dependent upon their status as tax havens making them vulnerable to money laundering
and financial policy decisions upon which they hold no sway (Hampton and Christenson 2002).
Finally, a dizzying set of varied political arrangements and jurisdictions that tie islands to their
past occupiers, perpetuate the systemic power of core nations limiting island sovereignty. The
current illegal US military boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific under the pretext of “narco-
trafficking operations” is another illustration of the subordinate status of islands. According to
the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights, the US is in breach of
international human rights law. The present death toll of over two hundred in waters near to
islands is an outcome of the US rejecting laws that islands depend upon. This includes the
prohibition of the unilateral use of force in international waters and its obligation (despite it not
being a signatory) to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UN News 2025).
A Body of Land Surrounded by Secrets
With an island feminist perspective we arrive at the atrocities on Little St. James with much
disgust but little surprise. Painfully central is patriarchy and misogyny and the physical and
emotional violence wrought on girls and women for years with the capitulation and silence of so,
so many “important” persons—politicians, scientists, doctors, financiers. In other words, the
assortment of privileged actors brought together by Jeffrey Epstein are contemporary reflections
of those aboard Columbus’ or Cooke’s ships, rich men making their way together to islands with
the interest of increasing their wealth.
There is nothing of island geographies that beg for control, corruption, or depravity. My
arguments do not essentialize islands. Rather, as a specific sort of spatial arrangement islands are
contrived as conduits for bleak aspects of capitalism. Capitalist accumulation requires subterfuge
in many forms. And while this can include activities such as tax havens, insider-trading, toxic
dumping, foremost is its utter dependency on the hidden cost of labor--capital’s indispensable act
of subterfuge. As a whole, islands have been exploited by foreign entities to keep things secret.
In the various forms of extractive labor on plantations, as with penal colonies, the exploitive
work for the production of tourist experiences, or financial off-shoring, islands proffer
opportunities for hiding.
Hiding is entrenched in capitalism. What is the purpose for sole ownership or the type of privacy
sought in purchasing an entire body of land? Contemporary owners of islands are often
exceptionally wealthy, concealing their behaviors and seeking to avoid others’ rules, including
the jurisdiction and regulations by which the islands they own are officially governed.
Through the fetishism of commodities, Marx shows us that the forgetting of labor is at the
foundation of capitalist expansion. The girls and young women were hired labor—paid to give
massages, which lead to physical and emotional violence and abusive relationships with Epstein.
Many were compensated as recruiters to rope in other girls. Feminist scholarship continues to
delineate the many ways that the construction and exploitation of gender devalues women’s
work and leads to the consumption of girls and women as sexual objects. This includes the racist
stereotypes around sex and gender that drive sex trafficking, transporting girls and women from
one location to another.
The Island Responds
Islander, “a native or inhabitant of an island” first appeared in print around 1550 as did the term
“colony.” Interestingly, the trend in the use of the term in print rose distinctly in the 1820s and
then dropped dramatically over the 1900s. Starting in the 1990s the term shows a rising trend
reaching in 2019 its 1800 level (.15 occurrences per millions of words) (Google Books Ngram
Viewer 2026). The trend of the term islander (in English) is telling in that it traces to the
expansion of the world-system and the role islands play in it. Unlike the term “colony,” which
has gone flat, the increased use of “islander” affirms islands’ topicality as outlined at the start of
this essay.
In this last section, through the case (ST-20-CV-014) filed by the Government of the US Virgin
Islands (USVI) in January 2020 under the leadership and meticulous work of then Attorney
General Denise George, I consider an islander response to Epstein’s hustle on Little St. James
Island. The legal case against the Estate of Jeffrey E. Epstein, his Trust, LLCs, and others
outlines his pattern of multiple holdings to the extent that they are known and how he secured the
purchase of two islands (one after his 2008 conviction) to hide the exploitation, harm, and
containment of girls and young women.
USVI vs the Epstein Estate is an example of an island feminist praxis (Rodríguez-Coss 2021).
Though the perspective is capable of revealing specificities of island inequalities, historical
conditions of colonization and appropriation, “Island feminist praxis identifies contemporary
feminist activist strategies of resistance as they contest dominant constructs of islands and
heteropatriarchal gender paradigms” (Rodríguez-Coss 2021). That the AG and her team
succeeded in holding Epstein and his estate to account, supported young girls and women in their
testimonies, and secured financial compensation for them deserves more public attention in
comparison to the failure of the US Justice Department. It also reflects the potential for a
strategic essentialism (Spivak 1985) of islanders to resist the stereotypes and exploitation of the
island.
The 48 page lawsuit which includes 22 separate accounts filed by USVI AG Denise George is
instructive for considering how the island matters in global capitalism. The two themes that
organize the lawsuit are the maze of financial dealings and formation of off-shore companies and
the containment, trafficking, and manipulation of girls.
Holding Liable Epstein’s Labyrinth of LLCs
The case documents the network of limited liability companies (LLCs) which Epstein relied
upon to hold his wealth, limit detection and liability, and secure secrecy and silence, paying off
many through these companies who witnessed or facilitated human trafficking and harm against
children.
Little St. James was first acquired by a Delaware entity of which Epstein was the sole member,
L.S.J., LLC and eventually sold it to Nautilus, LLC, for ten dollars which he incorporated in the
USVI. The allegations suggest that Epstein continued to establish new entities and transferred
property and funds to “conceal the unlawful acts described in the Complaint.” (16) [1]
Shell companies are entities that generally exist on paper alone created by those with enormous
wealth in off-shore locations to hide their known assets, reduce tax liabilities, or to hide illegal
activities. They are formed in island places like the USVI which become “tax havens” because of
the minimal taxes charged. Delaware, is a US state which is considered a tax haven because of
its distinct policies such as privacy protection where the names of shareholders or officers do not
have to be publicly disclosed and where the owner, member, director, in other words all positions
of an LLC, can be held by one person. Such was the case with LSJ, LLC, of which Epstein was
the sole person on record.
Thus far, approximately fifteen of Epstein’s listed companies that have been identified to be
directly connected to sex trafficking were legally incorporated in USVI. Banks (Bear Stearns,
JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, among others) should have identified
patterns and/or the size of financial transactions by these entities as questionable but selected to
not act or delayed reporting until after Epstein’s death or after his arrest (Goldstein 2024, US
Senate Finance Committee 2025). Epstein alone held at least 50 separate accounts with
JPMorgan Chase.
All but the first of these entities are legally incorporated in USVI which collectively amount to
an international crime ring. Banks (Bear Sterns, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Bank of
America, among others) should have identified patterns and/or the size of financial transactions
as questionable but selected to not act or delayed reporting until after Epstein’s death or after his
arrest (Goldstein 2024, US Senate Finance Committee 2025). Epstein alone held at least 50
separate accounts with JPMorgan Chase.
In the instance of Great St. Jim LLC, the shell company was illegally formed in 2015 for the
purpose of purchasing Great St. James. Sulant Ahmed bin Sulayem, a long time associate of
Epstein with whom he shared misogynistic and potentially criminal communications that became
public with the release of the files by the US DOJ, still denied the use of his name when Epstein
asked for it to set up a shell company to purchase the neighboring island. Christian Kjaer, the
former owner, had been explicit in his refusal to sell the island to Epstein. It was only when
Southern Trust Company, Inc., began filing for building permits that it was made known that
Epstein was the owner.
This revelation did nothing to halt Epstein’s efforts—under the shell business entity, Southern
Trust Company, Inc. he received tax breaks from Albert Bryan, who remains as USVI Governor
though evidence mounts on his corrupt association with Epstein (Carlson 2026). The allegation
in the case pursued by AG George, is that Great St. James was purchased “to further shield his
conduct on Little St. James from view” and prevent escape or the girls obtaining help from
others (27).
Along with an intentionally dizzying array of shell companies, two primary forms by which
Epstein sustained his island empire were by purchasing secrecy and allegiance. This includes
threats to those who signed non-disclosure agreements (NDA), which is especially unfortunate
given that attempts to conceal illegal activity even with an NDA disqualifies it in court. The
island was locally referred to as “pedophile” or “orgy island” and yet sex crimes persisted. The
accountability of hundreds of employees and others remains in question, so many who witnessed
girls and young women being brought to the island, the aftermath of illicit sex crimes or the girls
who tried to run away. While workers will bear the moral weight of their silence, ethnographic
research here could be especially useful to determine how exactly he deterred autochthonous
Virgin Islanders from reporting to develop strategies to deter such impact in the future.
Many news articles on Epstein imply that he possessed a unique “stealth and rule-bending guile,”
implying that even smart powerful men were seduced by him. A PEWS inspired island feminism
approach demonstrates that presently and historically, systemic stealth, secrecy, and the abject
commodification and abuse of women and island populations are foundational to the global
movement of capital. There is nothing special about Epstein.
The Carceral Island: The Gendered Manipulation and Containment of Girls and Women
There is a long legacy of transporting and trafficking humans to islands and forcing or
misleading and containing them in terrible labor conditions. The lawsuit alleged that: “a pattern
and practice of trafficking and sexually abusing young women and female children on this
private, secluded island of Little St. James, where Epstein and his associates could avoid
detection of their illegal activities from Virgin Islands and federal law enforcement and prevent
these young women and underage girls from leaving freely and escaping abuse” (italics mine
23). It goes on to share the testimony of a fifteen year old girl who was “forced into sexual acts
with Epstein and others and then attempted to escape by swimming off the Little St. James
island. Epstein and others organized a search party that located her and kept her captive by,
among other things, confiscated her passport.” (54)
With Epstein, and for many tourists who are seeking solace or secrecy, the island is flipped from
socially thick communities of islanders, to a place for secrecy and hiding. The parameters of
Little St. James were heavily securitized including the use of guard dogs. Snorkelers and tourist
boats that ventured near the shores of Little St. James were accosted by security guards (Coto
2019). In 2018, when investigators sought to disembark, they were refused entry as Epstein
claimed the dock as his front door, further demonstrating how he manipulated the physical
geography of islands for illegal activities. The lawsuit alleged that Epstein Estate “took
advantage of the secluded nature of the islands in furtherance of its crimes.”(63)
Moving groups of young women and girls from all over the world to a small Caribbean island
requires a wide net of coordination and manipulation. Pilots, air traffic controllers, and others
along the transportation circuit must have had some awareness that kids were not traveling with
their parents. Indeed the court filing states, “Air traffic controllers and other airport personnel
reported seeing Epstein leave his plane with young girls some of whom appeared to be between
the age of 11 and 18 years.” (48) Furthermore, “flight logs and other sources establish that
between 2001 and 2019 the Epstein Enterprise transported underage girls and young women to
the Virgin Islands.” (32) Even more insidious is the calibrated tactics of Epstein’s pedophilic
pursuits as suggested in the allegation that the “Epstein Enterprise kept a computerized list of
underage girls who were in or proximate to the Virgin Islands.”
There is no direct route to Little St. James Island. The nearest landing strips to the island were on
St. Thomas. From there, girls were either carried by helicopter or at times put on boats and
trafficked to St. James Island. The girls and young women agreed to board flights under false
pretense. Some, as stated, were told that they would be paid to give massages; others that a visit
to the island was an opportunity to launch modeling careers; others were lured by offers of
scholarships, or money, gifts, or medical care for ill family members.
That girls and young women were manipulated by these offers or false opportunities is
understandable when framed in the context of a capitalist sexist world system. To think of the
realization that may have occurred, when for example, a girl said no, or a woman, said no more,
or sought to leave the island, is heartbreaking, their presence on the island no longer perceived as
voluntary but recognized as imprisonment.
Conclusion
Islands are determinately key sites for the onset and extension of the capitalist world-system, a
position that welcomes critique and inquiry especially from a PEWS perspective into how certain
geographies or spatial manifestations shape the trajectory of global economic transformation
(including the British isles).
The deception sustained by Epstein involved networks of actors to perpetuate a stream of girls
and young women to the island, and many wealthy participants seeking and seizing the chance to
engage in what amounts to sex crimes that they believed would remain hidden. Historical
comparisons on the space of islands parallel: wealthy and privileged generally white or European
men arrive in groups to islands in pursuit or in demonstration of wealth and ownership; adults
and children are trafficked to them for their labor; local populations are disappeared or exploited;
and girls and women are sexually assaulted, raped, and objectified in misogynistic
demonstrations of power.
A proposition here is to (re)invigorate PEWS with feminist and geographical or spatial
approaches. In other words, is there any use in thinking about the role of geographical units in
the world-system, specifically islands? While this essay is focused on the histories of those that
exploit the island, island feminism scholarship mindfully addresses the generative and deeply
relational lives of islanders in their centuries of resistance and their very varied and particular
social histories from region to region, island to island, ocean to ocean. Yet both the exploitation
of island geographies to sustain the capitalist world system, and the remarkable grassroots
resistance by islanders deserve more critical exploration.
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[1] Claim as numbered in the legal filing of USVI v. the Epstein Estate,
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