Synopses & Reviews
Recently, a volatile global economy has challenged the United States to rethink its financial policies toward economically troubled countries. Emily Rosenberg suggests that perplexing questions about how to standardize practices within the global financial system, and thereby strengthen market economies in unstable areas of the world, go back to the early decades of this century. Then, dollar diplomacy--the practice of extending private U.S. bank loans in exchange for financial supervision over other nations--provided America's major approach to stabilizing economies overseas and expanding its influence.
Policymakers, private bankers, and the members of the emerging profession of international economic advising cooperated in devising arrangements by which U.S. banks would extend foreign loans on the condition that the countries hire U.S. experts to revamp financial systems and exercise some supervision. Rosenberg demonstrates that these arrangements were not simply technical and shows how they became central to foreign policy debates during the 1920s, when increasingly vocal critics at home and abroad assailed dollar diplomacy as a new imperialism. She explores how loan-for-supervision arrangements interrelated with broad cultural notions of racial destiny, professional expertise, and the virtues of manliness. An innovative, interdisciplinary study, Financial Missionaries to the World illuminates the dilemmas of public/private cooperation in foreign economic policy and the incalculable consequences of exercising financial power in the global marketplace.
Review
The history of dollar diplomacy between 1900 and 1930 reveals as much about the role of culture, the exercise of power, and masculine identity in foreign affairs as it does about the pursuit of economic interests
Rosenberg's remarkable book removes the illusion of impartiality that has too often been central to the history of those financial experts who were employed as dollar diplomats. In so doing, she has solidified her position as a leading scholar of culture and gender in international history. Mira Wilkins - Enterprise and Society
Review
Rosenberg is excellent in tracing the relationships among the financial advisers, the American banks, and the U.S. State Department
Her work is a splendid archive-based, well-footnoted
study of U.S. economic diplomacy. It is a real achievement and highly recommended. It has no equal in its nuanced and excellent discussion of U.S. financial advisers, their links with the U.S. State Department, their relationships with the banking community and the public that invested in bonds, and their importance in encouraging international lending by reducing uncertainties. Times Literary Supplement
Review
Dollar diplomacy's architects saw it as a progressive alternative to colonialism. It would, in Taft's words, substitute 'dollars for bullets' in promoting peace and prosperity. Rosenberg shows that it was not only a technical exercise in economics, but also a cultural venture, shaped by faith in expertise and rational policy-making...Rosenberg deals clearly with the sources of opposition to dollar diplomacy in the countries it affected, but pays as much attention to the protests it constantly provoked in the US itself. Christopher Clark
Review
Financial Missionaries to the World is an example of what might be called the new diplomatic history--grounded in multi-archival research and cognizant of recent developments in cultural studies. Ms. Rosenberg examines the diplomatic practice of financial strong-arming through U.S. coordination of private-bank loans to developing economies. Her book is filled not only with the murmuring of diplomats, but with the holler of pop culture as well. William O. Walker III - American Historical Review
Review
Those uncertain about the International Monetary Fund's current approaches to promoting stable exchange rate will find instructive similarities in this volume about UIS policies in this century's first three decades. Jeff Sharlet - Chronicle of Higher Education
About the Author
Emily S. Rosenbergis DeWitt Wallace Professor of History at <>Macalester College.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Gold-Standard Visions: International Currency Reformers, 1898-1905
The Meanings of Money and Markets
Turning Silver Standards into Gold
The Commission on International Exchange
The New Specialists in International Financial Advising
2. The Roosevelt Corollary and the Dominican Model of 1905
Gender, Race, National Interest, and Civilization
The Dominican Model
Development of Investment Banking
International Precedents for Fiscal Control
Fiscal Control through Public-Private Partnership
3. The Changing Forms of Controlled Loans under Taft and Wilson
Extending the Dominican Model
Control by Private Contract
Opposition to Taft's Dollar Diplomacy
Tightening Dollar Diplomacy under Wilson
Public-Private Interactions and Consenting Parties
4. Private Money, Public Policy, 1921-1923
The Postwar Political Economy and Loan Policy
Postwar Controlled Loans in the Western Hemisphere
5. Opposition to Financial Imperialism,1919-1926 The Postwar Anti-imperialist Impulse
"Is America Imperialistic?" Conflicting Cultural Narratives
Anti-Imperialist Insurgency after 1924
The U.S. Government Backs Away
6. Stabilization Programs and Financial Missions in New Guises, 1924-1928
Approaches to Stabilization
The Kemmerer Missions in South America
European Stabilization and the Dawes Plan
Poland: A Kemmerer Mission in Europe
Persia: The Millspaugh Mission
7. Faith in Professionalism, Fascination with Primitivism
Professionalization and Financial Markets
Mass Culture and Primitivism
8. Dollar Diplomacy in Decline, 1927-1930
The Questionable Impact of Supervisory Missions
Opposition to U.S. Supervision
Deterioration of the Bond Market and the End of Foreign Lending
Public Policy and the End of an Era
Looking Backward and Forward
Abbreviations
Notes
Index