Branching Out: Banking, Credit, and the Globalizing US Economy, 1900s–1930s

Abstract

Daniel DeMenocal arrived in Hong Kong in the early 1900s as the first US staffer of one of the earliest US bank branches in Asia. Of all the things that might have impressed him—China’s treaty ports, financing opium trade, the language barrier—one that stuck out was the handwriting: “These young Britishers all had extremely good hand-writing,” he later recalled.1 DeMenocal learned the consequences of sloppywriting, after several colleagues from the International Banking Corporation were demoted over their poor handwriting. The bank sent young US staffers like De Menocal to London to learn proper British banking methods. At the time, the idea of a US “international banker” hardly existed. Training in Londonwas a way to counter the deficit in domestic know-how. But when De Menocal’s colleagues failed to master penmanship, they had to prolong their stay. “[T]heir handwriting was so bad,” recalled De Menocal, “that the London office could make no use of their service and they were all sent to an English school to be taught how to write before they were permitted to touch pen to paper.”2 As De Menocal learned, legible and accurate records were essential to the success of financial institutions, and those institutions were themselves vital linkages connecting imperial metropoles and their colonies, territories, andmarkets around the world. Clean handwriting and rigorous bookkeeping constituted the prosaic foundations onwhich financial empires were built.3 My dissertation, “Branching Out: Banking, Credit, and the Globalizing US Economy, 1900s–1930s,” investigates these foundations. It untangles the interrelations of expanding US global power in the early twentieth century and the protocols and paperwork of US foreign banking that undergirded it. Doing so reveals that US empire-building was not a coherent,monolithic project devised inWashington, DC, boardrooms but insteadwas amessy coproduction of often divergent publicand private-sector agendas. Despite their tensions, these agendas nevertheless had the effect of expanding US influence around the world.