Looking back from our contemporary vantage point, the United States’ global capitalist empire looks both omnipresent and inevitable. Much of the world’s trade is denominated in dollars. American financial institutions are at the helm of international investment and capital transfers. And US military might enforces this order, either implicitly—or sometimes quite explicitly.

But as Mary Bridges argues, America’s financial dominance was neither pre-ordained nor monolithic, particularly in its early days at the start of the twentieth century. In her new book, Bridges’ follows the foot soldiers on the imperial frontier: everyday bankers, working at overseas branch banks in places like Manilla and Hong Kong. It was these bankers who did the daily work of building out American global finance. And they brought with them their classed, racialized, and gendered worldviews, embedding those structures of inequality in the very foundations of dollar-dominated globalization.

Check out the episode here!

Mary Bridges is a historian of the twentieth-century United States. Her research investigates the linkages between US foreign relations and business history. Her book Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower (Princeton University Press, September 2024), argues that US multinational banks provided a crucial infrastructure of both global capitalism and US empire in the early twentieth century. The project explores the changing credit practices of overseas bankers, as US banks navigated new ways to profit from trade finance and their relationship to the US government.

She is currently a research fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University’s International Security Studies program and at Johns Hopkins SAIS. She holds:

• a PhD in history from Vanderbilt,
• an MA from Yale in International Relations, and
• a BA from Harvard in history and science.

Prior to graduate school, she worked as a business reporter and editor.