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Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean. By Peter James Hudson . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 361 pp. Figures, notes, index. Cloth, $45.00. ISBN: 978-0-226-45911-0.
Peter James Hudson has produced an exceptionally well-researched study of the expansion of U.S. banking in the Caribbean and Central America from the 1890s to the 1930s, coinciding with the extension of U.S. power over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. Through a deep dive into archival sources in English, Spanish, and French, Hudson reconstructs the exploits of Yankee bankers, from the early fly-by-night schemers who tried to land profitable contracts as fiscal agents from U.S. authorities, to the precocious internationalists who competed, with limited success, against established Canadian and British banks as well as home-grown institutions, and finally to the arrival of the big league players, National City and Chase National, which made their move during World War I, when a global financial realignment at last allowed New York bankers to win out over their rivals.
Prodigious archival work allows Hudson to construct a genealogy of the men (as all of them were) involved in Caribbean banking, a cast of characters that jumped not only from firm to firm but often from one tropical nation to another. Their lines of filiation are fascinating and suggest that this was a close-knit if not always cordial set of actors. Proceeding chronologically, Hudson offers bite-size biographies of Samuel Jarvis, Frank Vanderlip, James Stillman, Roger Farnham, James Morgan, Joseph Durrell, and Charles Mitchell as well as...