Higher seminar: Grounding the Fed: Agrarian Capitalism and Central Banking in the U.S. South

Abstract

In this presentation, I will introduce the arguments of my current manuscript. The book, entitled Grounding the Fed: Agrarian Capitalism and Central Banking in the U.S. South, tells a novel historical geography of the U.S. Federal Reserve System (“the Fed”), one of the most powerful institutions of the global economy. The Fed is unique among central banks—organized in 1914 as a decentralized network of twelve regional Reserve Banks, in addition to the Federal Reserve Board in Washington D.C. Yet this complex institutional geography remains overlooked in most scholarship on U.S. financial capitalism, which is almost entirely preoccupied with the machinations in Washington D.C. or on Wall Street. Grounding the Fed, in contrast, shows how policies arising in D.C. and New York were formulated, shaped, frustrated, and resisted in localized interactions across a much wider geographical canvas. Focused on the politics of money and finance in the U.S. South, I show how regional central bankers encountered the uneven development of U.S. capitalism during the early decades of the Federal Reserve when the institution confronted a difficult task of, on the one hand, governing the U.S. continental economy as a unified territorial whole while, on the other hand, recognizing the particularities of its constitutive parts. I show how Southern central bankers could not simply enforce universal templates of sound finance suspiciously colored by Wall Street but had to adapt to the peculiarities of their region. In the process, they pushed the norms of early-twentieth-century monetary policy and laid the foundations for the interventionist Federal Reserve of today.

Throughout the presentation, I will illustrate my argument by regards to a series of historical vignettes drawn from extensive research in difficult-to-access archives. For those that are interested in a more detailed history, I have attached a paper recently published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers which examines the Fed’s regulation of the Southern cotton economy in the years leading up to the Great Depression. This paper introduces many of the arguments of the book manuscript, in particular the aim to rethink a well-known political-economic institution by drawing on the theoretical resources of historical geography and critical agrarian studies.

Mikael Omstedt is a Faculty of Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto and a visiting researcher at the Department of Human Geography throughout the fall of 2026. Omstedt defended his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, Canada in 2025, and he has published recently in Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Antipode, Environment & Planning A: Economy & Space, and Geoforum, among other outlets.