American capitalist experiments in revolutionary-era Russia

Abstract

In this paper I document one particular moment in the making of the United States’ hegemony by tracking the lives of two American businessmen in revolutionary-era Russia. Drawing on a diverse array of archival sources (letters, diaries, photo albums, memoirs), and focusing on the training, practices, encounters, degrees of embeddedness and personal situations of two men (Walter Dixon and Boies Hart), I suggest that revolutionary-era Russia served in some ways as a proving ground for testing the effectiveness of American corporate structure, geoeconomic imaginations, and commercial practices. Although these two businessmen were minor figures in the much larger story of the making of American hegemony, their experiences in revolutionary Russia – experiences that were mediated through geoeconomic imaginations, local knowledge of place, degrees of embeddedness, personal encounters with people, places and networks, early twentieth-century ideals of manliness, and feelings of trust, anxiety, and fear – bring to life the uneven, chaotic, risky, and at times unsuccessful and violent ways that American capital began to move through difference in space.