In the opening decades of the twentieth century, U.S. dollars and bankers flooded into international markets on an unprecedented scale, giving rise to the United States’ emergence as a new global financial powerhouse. In Dollars and Dominion: U.S. Bankers and the Making of a Superpower, historian Mary Bridges examines this meteoric rise of U.S. economic power through an in-depth analysis of the day-to-day infrastructure, people, and relationships that built the nation’s international banking system. To frame her analysis, Bridges focuses on the expansion of the International Business Corporation (IBC)—later acquired by the National City Bank—one of the first U.S. banks to open branches internationally.

Using records from the IBC and other banks, imperial reports, personal memoirs, and industry journals, Bridges argues that U.S. economic expansion began with decisions by Gilded Age businessmen to open international bank branches modeled on the British imperial banking system. This burgeoning overseas infrastructure benefited from the support of the U.S. government, which believed financial expansion would advance ongoing efforts to strengthen political control over the nation’s growing empire. International banks gained another boost in 1913 when the United States reformed its banking infrastructure to create the Federal Reserve System. This new institution shored up the financial security of international bank branches, enabling them to expand their influence in markets reaching from Japan to Brazil to Spain and ensuring that the U.S. dollar became the main currency of exchange all across the globe

Throughout these discussions, Bridges asserts that the real movers of the increasingly global U.S. banking system were not institutions or board members at home, but the lower-level bankers working on the ground in financial markets across the world. These men forged the contracts, gathered the credit information, and built the banking infrastructure that facilitated the United States’ evolution into a global financial power. In examining bankers and the overseas branches they built, Bridges demonstrates the importance of imperial expansion, interpersonal relationships, and geographic adaptability to the growth and longevity of U.S. economic power.

This focus on the IBC and their acquirer, National City Bank, serves several purposes. Along with giving focus to her work and supplying her with an available source base, centering the IBC enables Bridges to examine the internationalization of U.S. banking from its origins as the pet project of Gilded Age business elites. These men—second-generation Vanderbilts, Guggenheims, Huntingtons, Goulds, and other members of the era’s hereditary elites—sought an alternative to the British banks that dominated international finance. Together, these men founded the IBC in 1901 with a charter issued by the state of Connecticut, one of the few states that still allowed for special charters rather than general incorporation. Leveraging their political influence in the Northeast, IBC board members persuaded the Connecticut legislature to include a provision in the charter permitting the IBC to open overseas branches, a rarity among U.S. banks of the early twentieth century.

The imperial origins of U.S. financial superiority loom large in Bridges’s analysis. Soon after its founding, the IBC opened branches in the United States’ newly acquired colonies and other important markets, including the Philippines, the Panama Canal Zone, and China. There, IBC employees worked to expand U.S. business interests and establish the dollar as the foundational currency for investment and trade—goals that aligned with wider imperial efforts to control and profit from colonial territory. Bridges notes that in exchange for perpetuating imperial expansion, the U.S. government invested in the IBC, preserving the bank’s financial security by allowing the institution to receive China’s indemnity payments from the Boxer Rebellion and naming the IBC a government fiscal agent in the Philippines. Bridges is also clear to show, however, that while the IBC benefited from imperial policy, its bankers did not always follow through on U.S. government initiatives. In the Philippines, for example, colonial officials hoped to advance U.S. business investment, yet the majority of the IBC’s early lending was to European, rather than American, investors. Even fewer loans went to Filipinos directly, demonstrating one of the many ways that international banking reified class and racial divides already extant in the colonies.

The creation of the U.S. Federal Reserve System in 1913 represents a turning point in Bridges’s work. The Fed, she contends, offered U.S. international banks new pathways toward expansion. Of particular importance was the Fed’s support of bankers’ acceptances—complicated financial contracts between buyers, sellers, and banks that extended credit for international commodity trades with fewer risks to lenders. Acceptances were not new to international financing, but the Fed’s increasing support of these contracts meant that U.S. bankers could avoid a major pitfall of traditional bills of sale, namely that a bank could not access the money it earned under a contract until both the good and the money fully exchanged hands, a process that often took months. Acceptances, in contrast, could be sold on a secondary market, allowing banks to access funds faster and invest in the global trade of commodity goods with more protection. Taking advantage of this new Fed-backed financial security, U.S. banks opened even more overseas branches across Asia, Latin America, and Europe in the late 1910s and 1920s, further spreading the global power of the dollar in the process.

Although Bridges highlights the Federal Reserve’s role in internationalizing U.S. economic power, she never forgets that the bankers running financial infrastructures across the globe served as the real impetus for U.S. economic growth. Bridges spends several chapters examining how these bankers—often Ivy League-educated, middle- to upper-class men—collected vital credit information on local borrowers, built relationships with businessmen and government officials, and served as liaisons for U.S. entrepreneurs overseas. Most importantly, Bridges describes how these men adapted the goals of U.S. banks, imperial administrators, and the Federal Reserve to fit on-the-ground circumstances in places like Chile, China, and other host nations across the globe. Some branches even hired local staff to help run, lead, and alter their bank’s policies. It was this adaptability, Bridges argues, that gave international banks the fortitude to survive the extreme downturn of the Great Depression and maintain the United States’ position as a global economic powerhouse in the second half of the twentieth century.

Overall, Mary Bridges’s Dollars and Dominion offers a well-researched, accessible, and insightful examination into the intertwined expansion of U.S. economic and imperial power in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Aimed primarily at scholars in the field or graduate students interested in U.S. financial history or the history of imperialism, Bridges’s thorough analysis aptly and persuasively demonstrates that U.S. imperial and economic expansion could not have succeeded if not for the everyday bankers who built and manned the infrastructure of our nation’s financial system, not just at home, but all across the world.