The City of London: The Secret Empire Inside Britain
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The City of London: The Secret Empire Inside Britain
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About this listen
Inside London is a one-square-mile entity older than Parliament itself. It has its own mayor. Its own police. Its own flag. And a permanent representative embedded inside the British legislature who has never been elected.
This is the City of London Corporation — and for centuries, it financed the British Empire.
But when that empire collapsed after World War II, something unusual happened. The land empire ended. The financial empire didn't.
In 1957, a quiet regulatory decision birthed the Eurodollar market — and the City reinvented itself as the center of global offshore banking. Using jurisdictions like Jersey, Cayman, and the British Virgin Islands, it built what researchers call "the spider's web": a hidden empire for moving capital outside normal regulation.
The old empire ruled territory. The new empire rules liquidity.
This episode investigates:
• The medieval charter that still protects the Square Mile
• The Remembrancer — the City's unelected agent inside Parliament
• How the Eurodollar market rewired global finance
• The birth of offshore banking and the spider's web
• Why the British Empire didn't disappear — it went underground