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The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire | The Secret World of Finance

Independent POV · 7.9M views · 2018-09-14 · 1:18:02

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Overview

A feature-length documentary on how the City of London and Britain's overseas territories built a global web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions after the empire declined. It traces how this network captured and hid wealth from around the world.

On Hacker News

Commenters repeatedly recommend it in tax haven and offshore finance threads as an excellent, low-budget overview of British offshore finance.

Recommended by 6 HN people across 8 months · HN mentions 2019–2024

Topics

Macroeconomics & financial crisesWorld historyMedia, journalism & propaganda
Search by tags
tax havenscity of londonsecrecy jurisdictionsbritish empireoffshore wealth

What people said

arminiusreturns · 2024-07 · Strong recommendation

Anybody who is interested in this topic really needs to go see this awesome documentary: The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire | The Secret World of Finance [VIDEO] It was even done on a 4klb budget!!! The reality is that the brits realized they could no longer maintain hard power and Lionel Curtis was the primary pusher of the psyop transition to "commonwealth" soft power while maintaining all the real vestiges of empire under a false name.

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arminiusreturns · 2020-09 · Strong recommendation

If are interested in this topic and you haven't seen the independent documentary "The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire", you owe it to yourself. It's a superbly done documentary on a budget of ~4k£. [VIDEO]

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arminiusreturns · 2019-11 · Strong recommendation

For those interested in this subject, I can't recommend the documentary "The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire" [1] highly enough. The guy who behind it not only did an excellent job, but did it for a tiny fraction of what a bigger studio would have spent for a much more inferior end result. [1] [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Independent POV, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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