In 1921, Roger Farnham, vice president of New York’s National City Bank, testified before Congress regarding the bank’s role in the U.S. occupation of Haiti. Accusations had been leveled against City Bank, most forcefully by James Weldon Johnson, first director of the NAACP, who charged that the bank had tried to enact “a strangle hold on the financial life” of Haiti and that Farnham “was effectively instrumental in bringing about American intervention” to protect the bank’s commercial interests (p. 112). As Peter James Hudson explains in Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean, Johnson was right. When political turmoil threatened City Bank’s Haitian investments in 1915, the U.S. State Department, at the bank’s request, sent an armed envoy to escort coffers of gold out of Port-au-Prince—an act in violation of Haitian sovereignty—that further escalated tensions between the United States and Haiti and set the stage for occupation. Farnham justified his actions by appealing to racial difference. He doubted Haitians’ “capacity for self-government and believed in the necessity of white intervention” if Haiti was to prosper in the future (p. 113).

In Bankers and Empire, Hudson chronicles this episode, and many more like it that unfolded across the Caribbean between the 1890s and 1930s, in order to make two crucial points. First, modern finance capitalism cannot be disentangled from racism and colonialism. Here, Hudson builds on a historiographical tradition that includes W.E.B. Dubois, Frantz Fanon, and most significantly, Cedric Robinson, who first coined the term “racial capitalism” to describe “the simultaneous historical emergence of racism and capitalism” and “their mutual dependence” (p. 13). Reading finance through the lens of “racial capitalism,” Hudson argues that the profits of imperial bankers “came in the form of both shareholder dividends” and “the reproduction of global white supremacy” (p. 14). Second, Bankers and Empire highlights the plural legal regimes U.S. bankers navigated in an effort to realize their imperial dreams. More often than not, this entailed skirting the law or taking advantage of vague regulations to gain a monopolizing foothold in the Caribbean. Most significantly, before the implementation of the Federal Reserve Act (1913), which lifted federal restrictions on domestic and overseas branch banking, bankers capitalized on legal loopholes by forming a complicated system of security or bastard affiliates that permitted them to operate in New York and abroad.

To support these claims, Hudson assembles a staggering array of sources, including company literature, newspaper articles, archived correspondence, ledger and minute books, and court and state department reports from archives in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Cuba. This impressive amount of source material parallels the expansive ground covered by Hudson’s analysis. In a relatively condensed 280 pages, he follows the machinations of the early experimental trusts of midwestern-turned-New York banker Samuel Jarvis, tracks the International Banking Corporation through the Panama Canal Zone, explores Chase Bank’s underwriting of Gerardo Machado’s regime in Cuba, details the Mercantile Bank of the America’s takeover of Nicaraguan finance, and charts City Bank’s exploits throughout the circum-Caribbean. Hudson ends with the economic depression of the 1930s to further underscore his main point—that imperial banking and “racial capitalism” were synonymous in the Caribbean. He argues that while individuals in the United States understood the 1930s economic downturn as “a crisis of financial capitalism,” intellectuals and activists in the Caribbean interpreted it as “a crisis in racial capitalism” (p. 256). Consequently, they adopted an anti-imperial politics that promoted blackness and independence as an antidote to white bankers’ racism and historical jeopardization of Caribbean sovereignty.

Furthermore, Hudson’s wide-ranging narrative allows him to introduce readers to an assortment of characters, some of whom—Jarvis and City Bank presidents Frank Vanderlip and Charles Mitchell—will be more familiar to U.S. business historians. Others, such as Joseph Durrell, the City Bank manager and vice president credited with returning the bank to “respectability and profitability” following the Cuban sugar market crash of 1920–21, have been almost wholly excluded from the historiography of U.S. banking (p. 178). It is in examining the racial attitudes of individual white American bankers that Hudson best shows the easy collusion of racial and financial capitalism in the Caribbean. Hudson’s discussion of Durrell provides an especially telling example. A “conservative” “banker’s banker,” Durrell successfully pushed for a policy of “thrift and savings” and expanded retailing investment to middle-class Cubans (pp. 181–182). However, not unlike Roger Farnham, Durrell also harbored white paternalistic assumptions about Cubans’ banking abilities and implemented policies that “undermined Cuba’s sovereignty by replacing the functions of the state with those of private capital” (p. 204). For instance, he used his connections with the U.S. government to win lucrative contracts that gave City Bank control over Cuba’s treasury. Durrell’s racism, Hudson suggests, while not the violent terror often endemic to empire building, still undergirded City Bank’s priorities in Cuba.

The greatest strength of Bankers and Empires is that it uses a range of analytical tools developed by cultural, political, social, and business historians. In our current historiographical moment, when scholars are increasingly blurring the methodological boundaries that long separated historical subfields and disciplines, Hudson provides an example of how to effectively intertwine different historical approaches anchored by the analytic of “racial capitalism.” On the other hand, the sheer number of institutions, actors, and contexts can be overwhelming for the reader. This is compounded by the book’s organizational structure, which is only roughly chronological and not otherwise arranged by specific bank, country, or theme. Without a clearer narrative arc, one may get lost in the details. These flaws, though, are largely cosmetic as opposed to interpretative. Overall, Bankers and Empire offers a welcome turn to “racial capitalism” in writing the history of twentieth-century U.S. capitalism and is a necessary read for scholars of the history of American business, political economy, and colonialism.