There was nothing inevitable or natural about the rise of US finance capitalism in the early twentieth century.

In Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower, Mary Bridges shows how US foreign banking began as a side hustle of Gilded Age tycoons and evolved into a more staid, bureaucratized network for bolstering US influence overseas. The early waves of US bankers built a network of international branch banks that relied on the power of the US government, copied the example of British foreign bankers, and built new alliances with local elites.

Overseas bank branches provided sites for experimentation in how to fuse US political will with local innovations and on-the-ground improvisation. In the process, branch bankers constructed a flexible and durable new infrastructure that supported the growth of US power abroad.

Using details from ledger entries and other sources, Bridges shows how these branch bankers divided their local communities into groups of “us” and "them," either as potential clients or local populations. In doing so, they constructed a new architecture of US trade finance that relied on long-standing inequalities and hierarchies of privilege. Thus, ideas developed by wealthy white men became part of the enduring fabric of financial infrastructure. She also shows how bank branches could accommodate these hierarchies to make room for new ideas about serving local markets, in response to financial pressures of the 1920s and after the Great Depression cut off other avenues of growth.

Bridges also tells the story of how US bankers created a market based on a new financial asset enabled by the Federal Reserve System called bankers' acceptance and began to collect vast amounts of foreign credit information.

Related resources:

Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean by Peter James Hudson
Infrastructure Is Remaking Geopolitics: How Power Flows from the Systems That Connect the World by Mary Bridges

Author recommended reading:

Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control by Sean H. Vanatta
The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives by Ernest Scheyder

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Episode 163: Novel Effect-Bringing Stories to Life