What’s Been Missing from Conventional Histories of Bretton Woods?

Abstract

This chapter advances three arguments about the Bretton Woods Conference. First, Bretton Woods was a product not just of the agency of innovative policymakers in unique circumstances but also of incremental institutional changes dating back some years before the negotiations began. Second, rather than being just an Anglo-American process, the Bretton Woods negotiations were characterized by procedural multilateralism in which policymakers from many other countries could—and did—bring important perspectives to the discussions. Finally, far from ignoring international development, the architects of Bretton Woods pioneered many of the core ideas on that topic that subsequently came to greater prominence.