Mary Bridges (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is a historian of the twentieth-century United States, with an emphasis on the linkages between US foreign relations and business history. Her current project, “Branching Out: Banking, Credit, and the Globalizing US Economy, 1900s–1930s,” argues that US multinational banks provided a crucial infrastructure of both global capitalism and US empire in the early twentieth century—and that the actions of banks and the state cannot be understood separately. The project explores the changing credit practices of overseas bankers, as US banks navigated new ways to profit from trade finance and their relationship to the US government. She holds an MA from Yale in International Relations and a BA from Harvard, and she worked as a journalist prior to graduate school.

The Economic History Workshop (EHW) is a monthly seminar series for Princeton students and faculty interested in the study of economic history. Co-sponsored by the Center for Collaborative History and the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy & Finance, the workshop provides a forum for scholars to present their findings and receive feedback on their research in a wide array of subfields, such as financial, business, labor, legal, intellectual, technological, and social history. Open to faculty, scholars, and students of Princeton University, Rutgers University, and the Institute for Advanced Study.