The Introduction revisits the judicial saga between the vulture fund FG Hemisphere and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world’s cobalt reserve, before Britain’s Privy Council to illustrate the blurry divisions between state/non-state entities, offshore/onshore capitalism. Tracking the patterns of symbolic valuation that justify the relationship between the African South and the global economy requires breaking away from the functionalist understanding of law and global value chains. The Introduction sets out the book’s research strategy, which is further explained in Chapter 1. Embracing the global turn in sociology, this involves tracking interconnected dynamics of legal intermediation across Britain, France and the US, in former British, French and Belgian colonies, in tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions, as well as in the institutionalisation of the international legal order. Approaching these interconnected dynamics as imperial encounters provides us with a history of the present relationship between law, politics and global finance.