| Dark Finance reconstructs the narrative history of the expansion of New York's banks and trust companies into the Caribbean through an exhaustive reading of diplomatic and governmental sources in the United States and Cuba, the financial press, and available banking archives. While demonstrating the importance of banks and banking to the success of the US colonial administrations in the Caribbean, I argue that the Caribbean was a laboratory in which bankers experimented with new organizational forms, new financial instruments, new regimes of capital accumulation, and new working relationships with an American imperial bureaucracy. I also show that bankers saw their economic labors in cultural terms. They understood notions of financial aptitude, fluency, and development in terms of racial mission and national destiny. The economic jargon that bankers used to describe their work and rationalize their market strategies drew on metaphors of race, biology, and cultural difference. Bankers' descriptions of how the economy functioned, how markets were formed, and how modern banks should be organized were based on beliefs in natural laws governing racial behavior, theories of history drawn from Social Darwinism, and conceptions of geography based on environmental determinism. Moreover, in order to sell the Caribbean to an American investing public, bankers engaged in an imaginative practice that saw the region performed within pamphlet literature, sales briefs, and newspaper articles. I illustrate the workings of this performative practice by comparing New York bankers' engagement with Cuba and Haiti. I argue that the different ways in which these two countries emerged within banking discourses---Cuba as a "mongrel" nation, Haiti as the atavistic "black republic"---shaped banking policy, while circumscribing the possibilities for the economic reform and national and racial development of the entire Caribbean region. |
