Imperial Underwriting

How European capitalists envisioned the world and produced U.S. power, 1857-19176

Christoph Nitschke

In addition to writing his book, Chris is researching for the project Imperial Underwriting: How European capitalists envisioned the world and produced U.S. power, 1857-1917. The project asks how the enormous capital movements of 1850-1920 constituted an imperial world order. It intends to analyse investor biases and expectations about the protean path of U.S. development. The approach here assumes that market transactions often reflected not optimal prices but imagined futures—of imperial hierarchies and profoundly racialized and gendered concepts of growth. Investment finance should therefore be treated as a cultural and ideational platform across empires whose valuation process needs to be historicized.