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Dollars and Dominion

English

By (author): Mary Bridges Professor Mary Bridges

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.

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A01=Mary BridgesA01=Professor Mary BridgesAge Group_UncategorizedAuthor_Mary BridgesAuthor_Professor Mary Bridgesautomatic-updateBankers and Empirebankingbanking infrastructurebookbooksBranching Out: Banking and the Globalization of US PowerBritish bankscapitalismCategory1=Non-FictionCategory=HBLWCategory=KCLCategory=KCZCategory=KFFKCategory=NHChina bankingCitigroupCOP=United StatesDelivery_Pre-orderdollareq_business-finance-laweq_historyeq_isMigrated=2eq_non-fictionFederal ReserveFederal Reserve Systemfinancefinancial infrastructureForeign Banks and Global Financeglobal financial powerglobalizationIBCimperial powerinfrastructureInternational Banking Corporationinterwar periodLanguage_EnglishMary BridgesNational City BankPA=Not yet availablePrice_€20 to €50Princeton University PressPS=Activeretail bankingsoftlaunchUS credit standardsUS currencyUS empireUS financial powerUS imperialismUS overseas banking

Will deliver when available. Publication date 03 Dec 2024

Product Details
  • Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
  • Publication Date: 08 Oct 2024
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Language: English
  • ISBN13: 9780691248134

About Mary BridgesProfessor Mary Bridges

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.

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