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Peter James Hudson completed his Ph.D. in American Studies at New York University. His research explores the history of capitalism, white supremacy, and U.S. imperialism, with a focus on the Caribbean and the Black world. Through the lenses of Black Studies and political economy, he examines racial dispossession and resistance, Black radical thought, and global anti-imperialism. He is the author of Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (University of Chicago Press, 2017), a critical study of finance, race, and empire in the early 20th century.

For issue #141 of The Internationalist, in our conversation, Professor Hudson traces how Wall Street’s racist, imperialist banking practices in the 19th-century Caribbean persist in modern financial systems.

Tanya Singh: Your work spans historical and contemporary financial systems. What continuities do you see between 19th-century colonial banking and modern financialization? And how does that inform present-day movements for economic justice, such as debt abolition or reparations?

Peter James Hudson: Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean examines the first wave of the internationalization of US banking and finance, during a period that stretches from the end of the nineteenth century and the “closing” of the US west and the Great Depression in the 1930s, a moment that marked the temporary curtailment of US overseas banking expansion. The book reconstructs the histories of both well-known Wall Street institutions (such as Citigroup, Brown Brothers, and JPMorganChase, in their earlier incarnations) as well as little known but important banking houses (including the International Banking Corporation, the North American Trust Company, and the Jarvis-Conklin Mortgage Company), as they sought an imperial foothold in Cuba, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Haiti. Importantly, the Caribbean region, for reasons of proximity, geo-political strategy, and political economy, was ground zero for the early history of the internationalization of US banking; it served as a training ground for many individual international bankers, and it was a laboratory for Wall Street as they developed and tested new financial instruments, new institutional arrangements, and new legal forms, while learning how to navigate foreign territories and cultures. Race was an important factor here – or, more precisely, racism was a factor as Wall Street was as racist as the rest of the United States and ideas of difference, racial hierarchy, and white superiority suffused the decision-making of bankers and shaped banking policy.

The most obvious continuities between past and present concern the institutions themselves: Citigroup’s history dates back to 1812. The predecessors of JP Morgan Chase include the Bank of the Manhattan Company, founded in 1799, the Chemical Bank of New York, founded in 1824, and the Chase National Bank, founded in 1877. These institutions predate many existing nation-states. In some cases, they have outlasted nation-states. As such, when we consider questions of contemporary finance, we must understand that what appears new often is produced by old, even ancient, corporate formations. The same can be said about the Wall Street law firms used by the banks, such as Sullivan and Cromwell and Shearman and Sterling. The legal teams of these long-standing institutions created the legal forms through which bankers moved overseas, often evading local, national, and international regulations (although sometimes simply ignoring local, national, international regulations). Finally, on the question of continuity, there is the question of race. The continuity of US finance from slavery to settler colonialism to imperialism to neoliberalism is also the continuity, expansion, and replication of white supremacy. It has been a continual effort to subordinate the “darker races” of the Caribbean and elsewhere to US political and economic hegemony.

As such, I believe that when we think about the present-day movements for economic justice we must focus firmly on Wall Street – on both the banking institutions and law firms that I have mentioned – and we must articulate a methodology and a strategy that understands finance with race, political economy with racism, and capitalism with white supremacy. Moreover, when it comes to questions of reparations, we need a comprehensive and transparent forensic accounting of Wall Street’s archives to understand fully their role in the financing of slavery and the slave trade, in the expansion of US imperialism in the Caribbean and elsewhere, and in the forms of exploitation and dispossession that have occurred within the domestic United States since the end of the Civil War. Neither historians nor activists have had access to these archives, and when financial institutions, such as JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup, have admitted their complicity with slavery, their reports have been obviously partial in-house affairs meant to appease the public while distracting from the full extent of their corporate malfeasance. Unfortunately, the current reactionary political climate in the United States means that banks, alongside law and insurance firms and other corporations, will have even less motivation to open their archives and confess their corporate sins.

TS: Your research highlights how financial institutions (like Wall Street banks) acted as agents of U.S. imperialism. How does this differ from traditional narratives of empire that focus on military or political control?

PJH: Bankers and Empire is really an extension of a rich literature on US imperialism by writers and scholars including James Weldon Johnson, Rayford Logan, Scott Nearing, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Hans Schmidt, Emily Rosenberg, and many, many others who have detailed the role of the US War and State Departments, private financial advisors, and the US military in shaping imperial policy, especially during the early twentieth century era of “dollar diplomacy.” As such, I don’t think I argue for an absolute difference from those traditional narratives; Bankers and Empire is really a supplement to that earlier research. I do, however, foreground the role of individuals like Roger Leslie Farnham, John H. Allen, and Joseph H. Durrell—employees of the City Bank who shaped policy on the ground in Cuba, Haiti, Panama, and the Dominican Republic and who became the vectors through which the instrumentalization of racism in banking policy could be seen on a personal, even intimate level. Moreover, while there is a long history of critiques of finance and finance capitalism within Marxist thought, banking institutions are often caricatured in this literature. I effectively entered the institutions themselves, examining correspondence, diaries, internal literature, even bank architecture itself, to reconstruct Wall Street’s vision of the world and to understand how and why bankers made their decisions. The research also affirmed a simple point: to understand US imperialism, follow the money. That path will most likely lead to Wall Street. 

TS: So, how did Caribbean economies resist or adapt to financial imperialism, and how did Black radical thought challenge these systems?

PJH: There was a particular bitterness among Caribbean elites that their sources of domestic exploitation were transferred to foreign entities, and they often sought to regain control of their local economies by pushing for the nationalization or localization of national and commercial banking organizations. Sometimes they merely begged for positions as managers or directors and happily assumed the position of neocolonial intermediaries, doing the bidding of foreigners to extract as much as possible from local labor and resources while benefiting from an economy of prestige and influence. There were, of course, less reformist, more radical critiques of Wall Street in the Caribbean. This appeared in the form of deliberately orchestrated bank runs that sought to undermine their daily operations as well as bomb attacks on branches and US-owned plantations. At the same time, Black nationalist like Marcus Garvey and Black Marxists like George Padmore and Pedro Albizu Campos recognized as early as the 1920s, that colonies and neocolonies of the Caribbean and Africa could not remain in a subordinate status to the US and Europe and Black liberation could only come through the inevitable and complete breaking of the chains of imperialist domination.

Meanwhile, on a cultural level, if financialization was also racialization, resistance to finance capital—anti-imperialist resistance, also means anti-racism, resistance to the modes of anti-Blackness that were embedded in Wall Street’s practices. Figures like Hubert H. Harrison and Marcus Garvey were critical in promoting the early manifestations of Black pride, but so too was the Haitian anthropologist Jean Price-Mars whose work, spurred by the white supremacist humilations of the US occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), led to a turn to the Haitian peasant, and to Africa, as the source of Haitian national culture, especially as an anti-dote, to borrow Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s phrase, to Wall Street. Such moves in Haiti, but also in Cuba and the United States, had an impact on the development of twentieth-century literary and cultural modernisms across the Black world. Unfortunately, many of these challenges were met by forces, in the form of political co-option, counter-revolutionary violence, and financial revanchism and retrenchment.

TS: Given the history you document in Bankers and Empire, what lessons should we draw about the relationship between global finance and sovereignty today?

PJH: In short, as long as corporate sovereignty trumps the sovereignty of states and citizens, the corporations will rule. Corporations are currently working in an almost completely unregulated environment, or, perhaps it is more precise to say that both the radical wealth of contemporary corporations and the accelerated technological innovation of contemporary corporations mean that they can easily evade any attempt by any state to rein them in. This will have, and is having, disastrous effects on working and middle-class people globally as their purchasing power is reduced and their efforts for democratic participation are curtailed, while their lives and labor and very consciousness are subject to the most extreme forms of extraction in the name of shareholder profit. And with that, while the environmental crisis is being fought over composting and straws and single use plastics, corporations are annihilating entire ecosystems and devastating water supplies and public lands. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the emergence of global movements against fascism, imperialism, militarism, and finance—we would do well to learn from the successes and failures of those movements today.

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