Bridges’ book, Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower (Princeton University Press, September 2024), examines how US businesses got global in the early 1900s as the United States created a new financial infrastructure of overseas branch banks. The book charts the precarious origins of this infrastructure, starting with a rickety imperial bank.

Within several decades of the turn of the 20th century, the network of banks evolved from their ramshackle beginnings to provide a durable foundation for the expansion of the US dollar and the global operation of US businesses.

The book explores how US banks functioned as pile-drivers for expanding the infrastructure of US global power in the 20th century.

Press & Reviews

• Listen to Who Makes Cents podcast with Dylan Gottlieb

• Listen to This is Democracy podcast conversation with Jeremi Suri and Zachary Suri (Oct 2024)

• Listen to this New Books Network podcast for an interview about Dollars and Dominion (Sep 2024)

• Watch a roundtable about Dollars and Dominion with discussants Harold James and Marc Levinson at the Wilson Center Seminar (Dec 2024)