A World Safe for Capitalism: Dollar Diplomacy and America's Rise to Global Power (review)

As U.S. foreign policy embarks on the "reconstruction" of Iraq at the outset of the twenty-first century, both implementers and critics of this venture would be well advised to consult Cyrus Veeser's compact account of the relationship between U.S. foreign policy and business interests in the Dominican Republic at the outset of the previous century. Now, as then (neoliberal and liberal tautologies about the natural laws governing international capitalism notwithstanding), U.S. economic interests depend upon diplomatic and military power. The New York-based Santo Domingo Improvement Company (SDIC) had powerful friends in Washington who provided it with noncompetitive access to a foreign dominion of U.S. power. However, as A World Safe for Capitalism shows, this pattern of late-nineteenth-century cronyism proved too inefficient to sustain the expansive interests of U.S. international relations.

As U.S. international pretensions proliferated, a broader vision of U.S. foreign policy—based in the Progressive Era's expansion of state autonomy within the domestic political economy—replaced Gilded Age instrumental relationships between specific business concerns such as the SDIC and the State Department. In Veeser's fresh rendition, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine is not simply a signal event in the development of unilateralism; it is the moment when U.S. foreign policy begins to mobilize U.S. capitalism and not merely do Wall Street's diplomatic bidding. In response to the Dominican crisis, Roosevelt "launched a sweeping new policy that injured the SDIC even as it moved Dollar Diplomacy to a higher plane" (p. 6). Reformulation of U.S. foreign policy in 1905 was not meant to defend existing economic relationships but rather to replace short-sighted, destabilizing financial arrangements in the Dominican Republic (and elsewhere) with more stable structures. If necessary, these changes would be imposed through an expanded self-proclaimed "right to international intervention"—not just military but also administrative (for example, by replacing privately operated U.S. customs receiverships such as the SDIC with U.S. government agents).

Veeser's work offers a sustained analysis of one key case of the connections between business and diplomacy at the turn of the century. Its meticulous research concisely fills a particular historiographical niche and presents a fine-grained picture of how the SDIC functioned within the corridors of both U.S. and Dominican politics. In some ways, it is a close-up version of Emily Rosenberg's wide-angle Financial Missionaries to the World (Harvard Univ. Press, 1999)—which Veeser generously cites—concerning the expansion and modernization of the extraterritorial administration of U.S. capitalism. It is also, though, an explication of the socioeconomic resistance instigated, and financial chaos caused, by Dominican president Ulises Heureaux's implementation of fin de siècle liberalism. This belief in progress through market expansion and technological innovation necessitated SDIC finance. Heureaux's ideological affinity with the dominant Western thought of his day extended to social Darwinism; his racialized conception of Hispaniola's barbarous "other"—Haiti—was crucial to his assertion that the Dominican Republic was destined to evolve toward a more modern and prosperous future under the tutelage of enlightened elites, while Haiti would remain mired in the past's literal and figurative darkness.

In the chapter entitled "Heureaux and the SDIC," Veeser effectively demonstrates how the dictator's attempts to impress foreign interests through spectacles of rule disguised his regime's shallow control of national society. Construction of the Central Dominican Railroad was a singular sign of Heureaux's modernizing mission, but his attempts to commercialize agriculture, privatize rural space, and proletarianize farm work (directly and indirectly connected to the specious foreign lending facilitated by the SDIC) provoked popular dissent and created opportunities for...