Mary Bridges. Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower

Mary Bridges opens her excellent study of American global economic power by depicting the scholarship on this early twentieth-century period in binary terms—divided between people-centered and institutions-centered narratives. Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower bridges the two sides, illustrating the “connective tissue of global power” and the “infrastructure of empire” built on credit files, manila envelopes, trade acceptances, foreign intermediaries, and social networks (18, 3). In a story of interwoven private and governmental authority, Bridges centers banks, tracing how their interactions with businesses and policymakers helped transform a British-dominated system into the American-led international financial order.