Dollars and Dominion

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A01=Mary Bridges
A01=Professor Mary Bridges
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Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Mary Bridges
Author_Professor Mary Bridges
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Bankers and Empire
banking
banking infrastructure
book
books
Branching Out: Banking and the Globalization of US Power
British banks
capitalism
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBLW
Category=KCL
Category=KCZ
Category=KFFK
Category=NH
China banking
Citigroup
COP=United States
Delivery_Pre-order
dollar
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
Federal Reserve
Federal Reserve System
finance
financial infrastructure
Foreign Banks and Global Finance
global financial power
globalization
IBC
imperial power
infrastructure
International Banking Corporation
interwar period
Language_English
Mary Bridges
National City Bank
PA=Not yet available
Price_€20 to €50
Princeton University Press
PS=Active
retail banking
softlaunch
US credit standards
US currency
US empire
US financial power
US imperialism
US overseas banking

Product details

  • ISBN 9780691248134
  • Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
  • Publication Date: 08 Oct 2024
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
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How the creation of a new banking infrastructure in the early twentieth century established the United States as a global financial power

The dominance of US multinational businesses today can seem at first like an inevitable byproduct of the nation’s superpower status. In Dollars and Dominion, Mary Bridges tells a different origin story. She explores the ramshackle beginnings of US financial power overseas, showing that US bankers in the early twentieth century depended on the US government, European know-how, and last-minute improvisation to sustain their work abroad. Bridges focuses on an underappreciated piece of the nation’s financial infrastructure—the overseas branch bank—as a brick-and-mortar foundation for expanding US commercial influence.

Bridges explores how bankers sorted their new communities into “us”—potential clients—and “them”—local populations, who often existed on the periphery of the banking world. She argues that US bankers mapped their new communities by creating foreign credit information—and by using a financial asset newly enabled by the Federal Reserve System, the bankers’ acceptance, in the process. In doing so, they constructed a new architecture of US trade finance that relied on long-standing inequalities and hierarchies of privilege. Thus, racialized, class-based, and gendered ideas became baked into the financial infrastructure.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, there was nothing inevitable or natural about the rise of US finance capitalism. Bridges shows that US foreign banking was a bootstrapped project that began as a side hustle of Gilded Age tycoons and sustained itself by relying on the power of the US state, copying the example of British foreign bankers, and building alliances with local elites. In this way, US bankers constructed a flexible and durable new infrastructure to support the nation’s growing global power.

Mary Bridges, a historian of the twentieth-century United States, is the Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.