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The dominance of US multinational businesses today can seem at first like an inevitable byproduct of the nation鈥檚 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鈥檚 financial infrastructure鈥攖he overseas branch bank鈥攁s a brick-and-mortar foundation for expanding US commercial influence.

Bridges explores how bankers sorted their new communities into 鈥渦s鈥濃�攑otential clients鈥攁nd 鈥渢hem鈥濃�攍ocal 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鈥攁nd by using a financial asset newly enabled by the Federal Reserve System, the bankers鈥� 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鈥檚 growing global power.