Peter James Hudson has produced an exceptionally well-researched study of the expansion of U.S. banking in the Caribbean and Central America from the 1890s to the 1930s, coinciding with the extension of U.S. power over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. Through a deep dive into archival sources in English, Spanish, and French, Hudson reconstructs the exploits of Yankee bankers, from the early fly-by-night schemers who tried to land profitable contracts as fiscal agents from U.S. authorities, to the precocious internationalists who competed, with limited success, against established Canadian and British banks as well as home-grown institutions, and finally to the arrival of the big league players, National City and Chase National, which made their move during World War I, when a global financial realignment at last allowed New York bankers to win out over their rivals.

Prodigious archival work allows Hudson to construct a genealogy of the men (as all of them were) involved in Caribbean banking, a cast of characters that jumped not only from firm to firm but often from one tropical nation to another. Their lines of filiation are fascinating and suggest that this was a close-knit if not always cordial set of actors. Proceeding chronologically, Hudson offers bite-size biographies of Samuel Jarvis, Frank Vanderlip, James Stillman, Roger Farnham, James Morgan, Joseph Durrell, and Charles Mitchell as well as capsule histories of the North American Trust Company, Banco Nacional de Cuba, International Banking Corporation, Banque Nacionale d'Haiti, and Mercantile Bank of the Americas and of Brown Brothers, J. & W. Seligman, City Bank, Chase National, and even the Royal Bank of Canada. Panama, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and the Philippines enter the picture, but Hudson's in-depth coverage centers on Haiti and Cuba, including close analysis of Chase National's collaboration with the bloody dictatorship of Gerardo Machado from 1925 until his overthrow in 1933. The level of detail that Hudson deploys is truly impressive, though at times readers may find themselves losing sight of the forest among the trees.

Hudson avoids presenting American banking hegemony as inevitable or U.S. capitalists as omniscient. Every venture he describes is speculative and contingent, and all must pay their own way. As he notes of the expansionist strategy of even the most “progressive” banker, City Bank's Frank Vanderlip, “what . . . was meant to be a systematic and rational approach to internationalization was prone to poor judgment, human error, vanity, and the frissons of cultural difference” (p. 137). Hudson's careful description of the crisis of 1920, which brought a crashing halt to the overextended credit of the war boom and the “dance of the millions” that followed, makes clear that even big firms like City Bank teetered on the brink—though City's deep pockets allowed it to rebound while lesser institutions failed.

Although the bankers moved into the Caribbean at the same time that Washington sent in the marines, Hudson makes clear that the U.S. government did not extend its power to benefit the capitalists in a simple, linear way, nor did the bankers act in patriotic support of empire. Even after the Spanish-Cuban-American War made the United States a de facto colonial power, Hudson asserts, “Wall Street found the US government reluctant to support the internationalization of banking” (p. 65). A decade later, Secretary of State Philander Knox “pressured the Haitian government . . . to include US interests” in a revived national bank, even as the American ambassador concluded that “the Bank is of little benefit to Haiti” (pp. 92, 96). Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan eventually followed City Bank's recommendations for Haiti, moving Washington toward the marine occupation that would last from 1915 to 1934. In that case, the collusion of bankers and policymakers is indisputable, but Hudson does not hide the fact that “Wall Street often clashed with Washington” (p. 6).

Hudson connects this encyclopedic history of banking and empire to the concept of “racial capitalism” (p. 5). Banks in Haiti, Cuba, and elsewhere operated with a “racial chain of command,” with white foreigners overseeing local people of color. Racist the bankers certainly were, as City Bank's annual minstrel show at its Wall Street offices abundantly confirms, while Americans on the ground seemed to develop little empathy for the people of the tropics. “There was nothing much to see, all tropical countries look alike,” one banker noted of Panama (p. 73).

Still, some readers may question the explanatory value of the term “racial capitalism.” Was Western power in China, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt—which included financial supervision—simply a variety of the racial capitalism that Hudson identifies, or was the intertwining of imperial power and financial control in the Caribbean unique? In a recent review essay in the Journal of Economic History (“Economic History, Historical Analysis, and the ‘New History of Capitalism’” [2017]), Eric Hilt criticizes historians of capitalism for failing to “falsify major elements of their arguments” (p. 515). Hudson may or may not identify with this emergent school, but it would have been interesting for him to ask why Canadian banks, for example, succeeded in the Caribbean without the support of occupations, protectorates, or customs receiverships controlled from Ottawa.

That said, to the Caribbean men and women who confronted U.S. military occupation along with American financial control and commercial domination, the line between state and private power certainly blurred. Hudson explains, “In Haiti, protests against the City Bank were folded into the generalized insurgency against the US occupation” (p. 266). He concludes the volume with the critique of George Padmore, a Marxist from Trinidad, of the exploitation of black workers in the Caribbean and in Africa. True to his sources, however, Hudson complicates the story by pointing out that national elites in Cuba and Haiti denounced foreign domination “through an attack on the presence of the black labor brought in by foreign capital” (p. 274). Hudson's masterful account will be the essential starting point for studies of capitalism and empire in the Caribbean.