In her review of Offshore Finance and State Power, Cornelia Woll identifies two sets of questions the book left her wondering about. The first is about generalizability, the second about the implications of the book’s findings for US monetary power. I respond to them in turn.

Putting state power at the center of my project required a state theory. But which one to pick? Instead of going by my own preferences, I decided to put that question to my interviewees. During fieldwork in Britain, Germany, Brazil, and Mexico, I asked them: “In your view, what is the state?” It was remarkable how similar the answers were within one country, and how different between them. It seems Quentin Skinner has a point when arguing that “the state” can only be understood in its genealogy (e.g., Genealogy of the Modern State, 2009). Hence, the book walks the tight rope of doing justice to the historical and geographical contingencies of individual states, while identifying general patterns. Its comparative strategy is to study the cases’ individual state history from a common analytical perspective: the “money view.” A country’s tax and banking bargains build the core of that perspective. These bargains are historically negotiated and institutionalized settlements about who must pay how much taxes, who is allowed to create money, and who gets access to credit. It allows identification of three patterns across the cases. First, it is a state’s historically grown relationship between economic and political elites and how they shaped the tax and money systems that explain offshore finance’s effect on state power. Structural variables, such as economic openness or the degree of inequality, have limited explanatory power. Second, for emerging economies, access to preferential liquidity makes offshore finance attractive to the state. For developed democracies, it is the possibility to cover up distributional conflicts. Third, it is offshore banking, not tax planning, that challenges state power.

It is this last finding that gives rise to Woll’s second question: if offshore’s potency lies in the ability to create and to access US dollars outside US jurisdiction, what does this mean for US American monetary power? The book does not answer that question as it explicitly studies the antipole to US financial hegemony: Eurodollar creation. The findings support Jeremy Green’s argument that Britain must be taken into account if we want to understand US global financial power (e.g., The Political Economy of the Special Relationship, 2020). Britain successfully combined the United States’ unit of account with English law, creating a monetary phenomenon vital for both, the escape from US regulations and global liquidity. Moreover, we must acknowledge private global banks’ power to create the offshore dollar and to determine access to it. Finally, the book highlights that Latin American countries helped establish the offshore system globally by absorbing the Eurodollar into their economies. It is in this varied perspective that constraints to US monetary power emerge next to its undisputed opportunities. These insights contribute to a more nuanced picture of US dollar hegemony.