ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the forms that United States foreign financial advising took during the transitional period from 1898 to 1930, after territorial colonialism had ceased to seem a viable way of imposing financial arrangements, but before the advent of post–World War II international financial institutions. It focuses on Latin America in order to develop a structural framework for understanding the different relationships from which North American financial advisory missions to various nations drew authority and legitimacy. In 1904, the Dominican Republic became a laboratory for working out new means of reforming the "backward" financial practices of foreign nations. The Dominican government accepted the foreign receivership in order to get the loan; the bankers extended the loan only because the convention's guarantee of government involvement minimized the risk; and policy makers used the loan to force a financial rehabilitation that would, they felt, advance the strategic concerns of the United States in the Caribbean.
