{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Mary Bridges on Bankers and the Dawn of American Empire","description":"Looking back from our contemporary vantage point, the United States\u2019 global capitalist empire looks both omnipresent and inevitable. Much of the world\u2019s trade is denominated in dollars. American financial institutions are at the helm of international investment and capital transfers. And US military might enforces this order, either implicitly\u2014or sometimes quite explicitly. But as Mary Bridges argues, America\u2019s financial dominance was neither pre-ordained nor monolithic, particularly in its early days at the start of the twentieth century. In her new book, Bridges\u2019 follows the foot soldiers on the imperial frontier: everyday bankers, working at overseas branch banks in places like Manilla and Hong Kong. It was these bankers who did the daily work of building out American global finance. And they brought with them their classed, racialized, and gendered worldviews, embedding those structures of inequality in the very foundations of dollar-dominated globalization. ","author_name":"Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast","author_url":"https:\/\/whomakescentspodcast.com","html":"