Description:

The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy welcomes Mary Bridges for a conversation on her new book. In Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower (Princeton University Press), 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.

Bridges is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. A historian of the twentieth-century United States, her 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.