In the early 1930s, thousands of small, rural banks failed in the United States. When government officials took possession of these institutions, to liquidate their assets and repay the banks’ creditors, they found something surprising: large quantities of sovereign debt, particularly from Latin American states and municipalities which borrowed heavily in the interwar years. The paper starts with this puzzle: how did rural U.S. bankers come to own the debt issued to pave streets, build railroads, and supply clean water across Brazil and Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru? In seeking to answer it, the essay offers a preliminary sketch of a new project, which will trace the transnational networks linking Latin American governments (bond issuers), British and American investment banks (bond underwriters), U.S. commercial banks and bond houses (bond distributors), and small, rural U.S. banks (the ultimate bond holders), showing how the networks grew and developed before the Great Depression, how they frayed and split during it, and how they eventually reformed—like much of the global economy—under firm U.S. government influence.

Sean Vanatta is a senior lecturer in financial history and policy at the University of Glasgow. His research examines the evolution of finance and financial governance across United States history. He is the author of Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control (Yale University Press, 2024) and, with Peter Conti-Brown, Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). Before arriving at Glasgow, he taught at NYU and at Princeton, where he received his PhD.

Pre-Circulated Paper

The pre-circulated paper will be available one-week prior to the workshop. The paper will be available to the Princeton University community via SharePoint(Link is external). All others should request a copy of the paper by emailing Friedrich Asschenfeldt.The Economic History Workshop (EHW)

(Link is external) (Link opens in new window) 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(Link is external) (Link opens in new window) 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.