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Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower
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 brick-and-mortar foundations 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. Doing so, they constructed a new architecture of US trade finance that relied on longstanding 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 that 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.
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 brick-and-mortar foundations 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. Doing so, they constructed a new architecture of US trade finance that relied on longstanding 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 that 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.
280 pages, Hardcover
Published October 8, 2024
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April 11, 2026
Pretty great. It's a rare joy to find a book that completely matches your research question. I'm writing a book on US empire, and I have a chapter on the 1910s linking the foundation of the Federal Reserve and US entry into World War I. It was clear to me that both events were key parts of the establishment of US empire, but I was lacking empirical support for the Federal Reserve aspect. Along comes Mary Bridges to supply exactly what I needed!
There's a ton of learning packed into this relatively short book. Bridges not only provides the high level technical and theoretical explanation I was looking for, she has clearly spent a good deal of time in the archives to back up her claims. In the early 20th century the United States was already the richest country on the planet. However, longstanding US prejudices against the banking industry, and British primacy in finance kept the US from having any international banks of note.
Bridges documents how that situation changed, first very slowly, through a charmingly inadequate business called the International Banking Corporation, and then very quickly after the founding of the Federal Reserve. The book feels a bit academic, I learned a lot more about the training practices of different eras of US bankers abroad than I wanted, but that only makes its conclusions seem more credible and valuable. It can often be difficult to connect the dynamics of international power to the day-to-day behaviors of bureaucratic workers. Bridges pulls it off elegantly.
This book is an excellent building block towards any understanding of the development of international finance and US domination of that sector.
There's a ton of learning packed into this relatively short book. Bridges not only provides the high level technical and theoretical explanation I was looking for, she has clearly spent a good deal of time in the archives to back up her claims. In the early 20th century the United States was already the richest country on the planet. However, longstanding US prejudices against the banking industry, and British primacy in finance kept the US from having any international banks of note.
Bridges documents how that situation changed, first very slowly, through a charmingly inadequate business called the International Banking Corporation, and then very quickly after the founding of the Federal Reserve. The book feels a bit academic, I learned a lot more about the training practices of different eras of US bankers abroad than I wanted, but that only makes its conclusions seem more credible and valuable. It can often be difficult to connect the dynamics of international power to the day-to-day behaviors of bureaucratic workers. Bridges pulls it off elegantly.
This book is an excellent building block towards any understanding of the development of international finance and US domination of that sector.
Displaying 1 of 1 review