Selling States: International Investment as Business and Practice

Combining case studies in the business of international investment, this panel explores the relationship between business and government in contexts of disruption and uncertainty: the ending of empire in Haiti and Ghana, and a period of financial crisis in the early United States. Our focus is not on institutions, efficiency, or resilience per se (although these are crucial questions for the history of international business) but on agents, processes, and impact, as these operated over time; on the language and work of investors, entrepreneurs, and financiers in crafting persuasive and consequential narratives of development; and on the power inequalities that shaped and stemmed from these particular networks of international investment. At root, all three cases embody varying degrees of exploitation, contestation, and extraction that inhere in the entrepreneurial procedures of state and nation-building. Such acts had widespread repercussions that reverberated throughout the Atlantic world in the modern era. This panel responds to the 2022 meeting’s invitation to bring together research across time periods and geographies, with papers addressing state-making and development in the United States in its transatlantic context (David Thomson, “Repudiation is Now Weighing Like a Mountain”: U.S. State Debt and Foreign Bondholders in the 1830s-40s), imperial and post-colonial France (Alexia Yates, "Making the Investor State: French Finance and Haiti’s Unpayable Debts"), and decolonizing Ghana (Bianca Murillo, "Contracts, Credit, and Crime: International Investors in Ghana 1960s-70s"). We intend to use this temporal and spatial breadth to explore shared questions about the publics that are summoned into being by international investment and sovereign debt, the embeddedness of financial networks and practices, and the narrative and affective work of international investment as a mainstay of both modern globalization and state-making.