ABSTRACT
One hundred years ago American bankers had little international significance. The world's leading financial markets in London, Paris, and Berlin regarded American banks only as conduits for their lucrative American investments. In the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, New York bankers, led by J. P. Morgan, gradually built up foreign operations. Still, most of this embryonic American international finance was concentrated in the Caribbean area, and it was very much secondary to the bankers' principal interests in industrial finance inside the United States.
