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Dollar Hegemony

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The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism

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Introduction

“Dollar hegemony” is a loosely defined phrase, usually referred 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 afterwards. 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.

As will be discussed in the sections below, if “hegemony” were measured only in numbers, it would seem fair to claim that the dollar enjoyed a hegemonic condition in progressively larger geographical contexts starting from the 1920s and that it is kee** it today:...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venezia, Italy

    Duccio Basosi

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  1. Duccio Basosi
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Correspondence to Duccio Basosi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate Center for Worker Education, Brooklyn College, New York, NY, USA

    Immanuel Ness

  2. Independent Scholar, Belfast, UK

    Zak Cope

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Basosi, D. (2019). Dollar Hegemony. In: Ness, I., Cope, Z. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91206-6_45-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91206-6_45-1

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