Mary Bridges

Mary Bridges is a historian of the twentieth-century United States, with a focus on US global power and infrastructure building. Her book Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower(Princeton University Press, 2024) shows how U.S. multinational banks became critical instruments of both global capitalism and US influence in the early twentieth century. The book, which was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize, reveals how U.S. banks learned to profit from trade finance while deepening their entanglements with the federal government.

Bridges is a research fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center. She previously held postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University and Johns Hopkins SAIS. She earned her Ph.D. in history from Vanderbilt University, an M.A. in international relations from Yale, and a B.A. in history and science from Harvard. Before graduate school, she worked as a business reporter and editor. She can be reached at mbridges@hks.harvard.edu.