Project description
A digital archaeology of global finance
Shell companies are the primary conduits of modern offshore capitalism, designed to decouple ownership from legal and financial accountability. By obscuring capital flows and the identities of those who control them, these entities have created a systemic ‘blind spot’ in economic history. Traditionally, historians have struggled to penetrate this opacity, often limited to fragmented national case studies that fail to capture a phenomenon that is, by definition, borderless. The ERC-funded DIGSHELL project aims to explore a methodological shift in historical research. Building on a pilot study of Luxembourg’s financial centre, the project also includes the offshore nodes of Panama, the British Virgin Islands, and Singapore. The research moves away from manual archival work towards a model of computational synthesis.
Objective
Shell companies have played a crucial role in the infrastructure of global capitalism as vehicles for tax engineering and maintaining secrecy. The challenge of finding suitable sources for a subject tied to secrecy, and a tendency to focus on national case studies for a phenomenon that transcends geographical boundaries, have hindered efforts to unravel these complex infrastructures. Building on a research initiative that focused exclusively on Luxembourg this newly proposed project adopts a global perspective. It seeks to illuminate the role of legal service providers, by adding three national case studies (Panama, the British Virgin Islands, and Singapore) and focusing on international arenas of legal coding of capital thanks to the company registers, a resource publicly accessible.
While this corpus will be enriched with various other sources, the vast amount of unstructured data from the company registers presents a challenge of access and analysis.To make this corpus amenable for distant reading, the raw data must be structured and made accessible through processing and expansion/enrichment. Once the structured data is available, we can use data analysis methods and visualization. The emerging use of large language models based on generative AI shows strong potential to significantly change the way historians will work with large-scale source collections in the future. DIGSHELL aims to be groundbreaking on two fronts.
It will provide a comprehensive history of global tax networks, unveiling the development of multi-jurisdictional spaces where national states, global companies, local financial intermediaries, and international organizations collaborate to build, sustain, and govern global financial infrastructures.
It addresses the new challenges and opportunities arising in the field of Digital Humanities through the systematic integration of AI, which not only necessitates rethinking data processing but also questions the hermeneutics of digital history.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities history and archaeology history
- social sciences sociology governance taxation
- humanities history and archaeology archaeology
You need to log in or register to use this function
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
-
HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
See all projects funded under this programme
Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
See all projects funded under this funding scheme
Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-ADG
See all projects funded under this callHost institution
Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
4365 ESCH-SUR-ALZETTE
Luxembourg
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.