The Jackson School of Global Affairs Brady-Johnson Book Series presents
Mary Bridges, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs:
“In Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower.”
Bridges explores the beginnings of US financial power overseas. By focusing on an underappreciated piece of the nation’s financial infrastructure–the overseas branch bank—she shows that US foreign banking was a project that began as a side hustle of Gilded Age tycoons. It then sustained itself by relying on the power of the US state, copying the example of British foreign bankers, and building alliances with local elites.
A historian of the twentieth-century United States, Bridges’ research examines the linkages between U.S. foreign relations and business history. Bridges will be in conversation with Michael Brenes, co-director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and lecturer in history.