"Reputation Rating and the State: How the US Government Got in the Business of Foreign Credit Information in the Interwar Period "

World War I precipitated major changes in the global status of the United States. Amid the upheaval of the war and its immediate aftermath, US trade skyrocketed, and New York displaced London as the global center of foreign trade. This paper examines administrative apparatus undergirding some of the tectonic changes in US global power and, in particular, the status of US business around the world. The presentation focuses on the role of the US bureaucrats in bolstering the nation’s power by gathering and inscribing credit information about foreign firms. Today, we typically think of the provision of credit information as the domain of the private sector, and recent scholarship has depicted the accumulation of credit information as a feature of market surveillance. This paper questions the role of the state in such information gathering, and it considers an expanded geography of information gathering. What happened when US officials were sent overseas to new context to assess firms’ reputations and financial histories? Drawing on primary sources from the US Commerce Department as well as trade journals and bank records from the 1920s and 1930s, the paper examines the work of Commerce Department officials as the foot soldiers of information collection and, by extension, mediators of public- and private-sector collaboration in reshaping US global power.