Financial Statecraft

As trade flows expanded and trade agreements proliferated after World War II, governments—most notably the United States—came increasingly to use their power over imports and exports to influence the behavior of other countries. But trade is not the only way in which nations interact economically.

This book examines historic examples of US public diplomacy in order to understand how past uses and techniques of foreign public engagement evolved into modern public diplomacy as a tool of American statecraft. The study explores six historic cases where the United States’ government or private American citizens actively engaged with foreign publics, starting with the American Revolution in 1776 through the passage of the Smith-Mundt Bill of 1948.