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Financial Missionaries to the World
The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930
American Encounters/Global Interactions
Book Pages: 352 Illustrations: Published: January 2004
Author: Emily S. Rosenberg
Economics, History > U.S. History, Politics > International Relations
Winner of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize
Financial Missionaries to the World establishes the broad scope and significance of "dollar diplomacy"—the use of international lending and advising—to early-twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy. Combining diplomatic, economic, and cultural history, the distinguished historian Emily S. Rosenberg shows how private bank loans were extended to leverage the acceptance of American financial advisers by foreign governments. In an analysis striking in its relevance to contemporary debates over international loans, she reveals how a practice initially justified as a progressive means to extend "civilization" by promoting economic stability and progress became embroiled in controversy. Vocal critics at home and abroad charged that American loans and financial oversight constituted a new imperialism that fostered exploitation of less powerful nations. By the mid-1920s, Rosenberg explains, even early supporters of dollar diplomacy worried that by facilitating excessive borrowing, the practice might induce the very instability and default that it supposedly worked against.
"[A] major and superb contribution to the history of U.S. foreign relations. . . . [Emily S. Rosenberg] has opened up a whole new research field in international history."—Anders Stephanson, Journal of American History
"[A] landmark in the historiography of American foreign relations."—Melvyn P. Leffler, author of A Preponderence of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War
"Fascinating."—Christopher Clark, Times Literary Supplement
Emily S. Rosenberg is DeWitt Wallace Professor of History at Macalester College. She is the author of A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (also published by Duke University Press) and Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945. She is coauthor of In Our Times: America since World War II and Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People.
1 Gold-Standard Visions: International Currency Reformers, 1898-1905 4
The Meanings of Money and Markets 5
Turning Silver Standards into Gold 12
The Commission on International Exchange 18
The New Specialists in International Financial Advising 23
2 The Roosevelt Corollary and the Dominican Model of 1905 31
Gender, Race, National Interest, and Civilization 31
The Dominican Model 41
Development of Investment Banking 47
International Precedents for Fiscal Control 52
Fiscal Control through Public-Private Partnership 56
3 The Changing Forms of Controlled Loans under Taft and Wilson 61
Extending the Dominican Model 62
Control by Private Contract 71
Opposition to Taft's Dollar Diplomacy 77
Tightening Dollar Diplomacy under Wilson 79
Public-Private Interactions and Consenting Parties 93
4 Private Money, Public Policy, 1921-1923 97
The Postwar Political Economy and Loan Policy 97
Postwar Controlled Loans in the Western Hemisphere 108
5 Opposition to Financial Imperialism, 1919-1926 122
The Postwar Anti-imperialist Impulse 124
"Is America Imperialistic?" Conflicting Cultural Narratives 131
Anti-imperialist insurgency after 1924 137
The U.S. Government Backs Away 147
6 Stabilization Programs and Financial Missions in New Guises, 1924-1928 151
Approaches to Stabilization 151
The Kemmerer Missions in South America 155
European Stabilization and the Dawes Plan 166
Poland: A Kemmerer Mission in Europe 176
Persia: The Millspaugh Mission 183
7 Faith in Professionalism, Fascination with Primitivism 187
Professionalization and Financial Markets 187
Mass Culture and Primitivism 198
8 Dollar Diplomacy in Decline, 1927-1930 219
The Questionable Impact of Supervisory Missions 220
Opposition to U.S. Supervision 230
Deterioration of the Bond Market and the End of Foreign Lending 240
Public Policy and the End of an Era 247
Looking Backward and Forward 253
Abbreviations 263
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