Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900-1930 (review)

This book is essentially the paperback version of a widely acclaimed work published in 1999 and awarded the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize in 2000. Reviewers of the 1999 book praised Rosenberg for her extensive research and insightful reconstruction of "dollar diplomacy," defined as the linkage and use of international lending and advising to stabilize and uplift backward areas. This approach, she showed, was not only a cornerstone of President Taft's foreign policy but was also rooted in earlier developments, subject to continued evolution under Taft's successors, and still of primary importance in the 1920s. Some readers have also been much interested in her linkage of the policy to the history of American corporatism, noting how it illustrates both the latter's attractions and its inability to deliver. But for readers of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, the book's most interesting features are probably its uses of cultural analysis to enhance our understanding of policy history.

In Rosenberg's account, dollar diplomacy took shape within, and interacted with, a larger context of competing cultural narratives. On one side were "professional-managerial discourses," offering visions of harmonious progress through the applied financial expertise of men like Edwin Kemmerer, Charles Conant, and Jeremiah Jenks. On the other side were "anti-banking discourses," representing money as "a force for greed, corruption, and exploitation" and dollar diplomacy as a "new imperialism," not a civilizing and developmental uplift. As the book traces in appropriate detail, dollar diplomacy's fortunes varied, prospering as the first narrative gained ascendancy but in retreat as the second regained prominence.

Rosenberg uses cultural analysis to show that the supporting discourse on professionalism was closely intertwined with discourses on masculinity, whiteness, and the attractions and repulsions of primitivism. In a stimulating chapter entitled "Faith in Professionalism, Fascination with Primitivism," she analyzes a variety of cultural products to show that the American culture of the period had its own versions of the "white man's burden" and the "primitive other" and that these images of race, gender, and natural hierarchy helped to make dollar diplomacy possible. In this context, Rosenberg's connections are more loosely drawn and less well documented than in others. But the chapter does add an illuminating dimension neglected in older accounts.

The volume can still be seen as timely. Commentators in 1999 noted how a version of dollar diplomacy had reappeared in America's support for the International Monetary Fund and, in operation, was having problems similar to those once faced by Rosenberg's "financial missionaries." Today another "new imperialism," with some striking similarities in its goals and mystifications, is again being attacked and defended.