Dollar Hegemony (original) (raw)

2021, In I. Ness, Z. Cope (eds), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

“Dollar hegemony” is a loosely defined phrase, usually referring to historically determined contexts in which the US dollar is adopted as the main international reserve instrument, unit of account, and means of payment. Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century, it has been used to describe a number of different situations, namely some regional contexts in the Atlantic area in the 1920s and 1930s, the non-Communist world between 1945 and 1989, and the entire global economy afterward. While originally used almost exclusively in the journalistic jargon in continental Europe, the phrase has progressively “gained currency” with broader audiences, globalizing in both a linguistic and a social sense. In this entry, I move from words to meanings in an attempt to show how the notion of “dollar hegemony” has evolved over time, what specific situations it has been applied to, and what political and intellectual messages were attached to its use – or to eschewing its use – in different historical and geographical contexts.