Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower (America in the World)

How the creation of a new banking infrastructure in the early twentieth century established the United States as a global financial powerThe 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 fore