The rise of American finance. Agency, institutions and structural power from colonial times to the globalization era

Whereas financial globalization has put constraints on the policies of most nation states and intensified the disciplinary pressures on their populations, it has, on balance, served to enhance the policy autonomy of the US state and to provide US corporations and consumers with ample access to credit. This fact has been recognized, but insufficiently analyzed, by critical perspectives in the discipline of international political economy. In the wake of the re-emergence of global finance, these approaches argue, US power assumed the form of structural, market-based power rather than direct, statist power. However, the literature has paid relatively little attention to the institutional basis of structural power and the linkages between the power of global financial markets and the capacities of the US state.;Drawing on the way the concept of structural power is used in the field of historical sociology and incorporating insights from social theory, the theoretical part of this thesis develops a conceptualization of structural power as the ability of some agents to organize social life on the basis of particular (both formal and informal) institutions and so to shape the agency of others. Such an institution- and agency-based approach to structural power allows for a more concrete understanding of the constitutive, transformative impact of American financial practices and relations on the nature and operation of present-day international finance. The thesis then proceeds to develop a historical sociology of American finance that breaks with an understanding of the American financial system as one characterized by weak institutions and a subordinate role for banks. Adopting an 'inside-out' approach to the growth of American financial power, it foregrounds the distinctive nature of American finance, traces the dynamics of its internationalization and conceptualizes the institutional linkages between the power of global financial markets and the capacities of the US state.