Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order - Softcover

Helleiner, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501704370 ISBN 13: 9781501704376

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2016

Synopsis

Eric Helleiner's new book provides a powerful corrective to conventional accounts of the negotiations at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. These negotiations resulted in the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank-the key international financial institutions of the postwar global economic order. Critics of Bretton Woods have argued that its architects devoted little attention to international development issues or the concerns of poorer countries. On the basis of extensive historical research and access to new archival sources, Helleiner challenges these assumptions, providing a major reinterpretation that will interest all those concerned with the politics and history of the global economy, North-South relations, and international development. The Bretton Woods architects-who included many officials and analysts from poorer regions of the world-discussed innovative proposals that anticipated more contemporary debates about how to reconcile the existing liberal global economic order with the development aspirations of emerging powers such as India, China, and Brazil. Alongside the much-studied Anglo-American relationship was an overlooked but pioneering North-South dialogue. Helleiner's unconventional history brings to light not only these forgotten foundations of the Bretton Woods system but also their subsequent neglect after World War II.

About this title

Review:

"Forgotten Foundations is classic interdisciplinary history, drawing on literatures from political science and economics as well as primary sources.... Helleiner has made an important contribution that will permanently re-frame how scholars conceptualize Bretton Woods."

Author: Barry Eichengreen Source: Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"By tracing back the origins of the World Bank and the IMF to the Latin American push for creating an Inter-American Bank and US initiatives around the Good Neighbor financial partnership, especially the financial advisory mission to Cuba in 1941–2, the author succeeds in demonstrating that the development of poor countries was indeed a key issue for the founders of the post-war financial institutions. Helleiner drew heavily on detailed primary material for his research and presents with his beautifully written book a completely new reading of the Bretton Woods negotiations."

Author: Tobias Leeg Source: Political Studies Review

"Eric Helleiner's Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods offers an original interpretation of the birth of the postwar order. Helleiner builds on previous scholarship and rejects accounts based on individuals (Keynes, White), though he himself makes intelligent use of biographical information.... This book is not just of historical interest. It also points to a way to reconcile the liberal international order with the development aspirations of emerging countries."

Author: Giovanni Farese Source: International Affairs

"Helleiner drew heavily ondetailed primary material for his research and presentswith his beautifully written book a completely new reading of the Bretton Woods negotiations."

Author: Tobias Leeg Source: Political Studies Review

"Helleiner's book is an erudite study of US financial diplomacy during the Roosevelt administration. To trace back the origins of state-led economic development to White and the 1930s, Helleiner covered a vast amount of secondary and archival sources. He thereby ends up doing much more than he set out to do.... His book is in fact a tour de force of US financial diplomacy before and during the Second World War, set in the larger context of global relations, and it is essential reading for scholars interested in the history of international monetary affairs."

Author: Nathan Marcus Source: The Economic History Review

"Helleiner's library and archival research incorporate sources previously absent from English-language scholarship on Bretton Woods. His writing... conveys clearly ideas that other social scientists would have clotted with needless jargon. Helleiner finds antecedents to Bretton Woods, incidents at the conference, and events afterwards to indicate greater importance for the emerging markets than has hitherto been acknowledged."

Author: Kurt Schuler Source: EH.Net

"In a masterly historical analysis based on extensive archival research, Helleiner shows that poorer nations were anything but voiceless. Their delegates played an active role in shaping the discussions, and their development aspirations were by no means ignored. In previous works on topics as varied as the postwar revival of global finance and the evolution of money, Helleiner has already established himself as an outstanding historian of the international political economy. In this book, once again, he has done an important service in correcting the historical record. The book is organized in eight chapters―four on steps leading up to the 1944 conference and four on the conference itself, all written in the author's usual lucid manner."

Source: Political Science Quarterly

"Somewhat surprising given his background in Political Science, Helleiner has eschewed grand theorising in favour of arduous archival research. But this certainly works to his advantage: He is neither forced to plaster historical material with concepts nor is he running the risk of selecting facts according to the demands of a specific theoretical paradigm.... That it will attract a huge readership is beyond doubt. It is certain to become a landmark study for all those interested in Economic History, Development Studies and Global Political Economy, and aside from academia, all those who want to understand the shoals of international economic cooperation."

Author: Alexander Brand Source: Journal of International Development

"The author has done a lot of arduous work in archives, and has come up with highly interesting, even provocative results.... [T]his book is highly recommended reading, of interest not only to people working on Bretton Woods and its two institutions, but also to people doing research on the dogmengeschichte of development."

Author: Kunibert Raffer Source: Zagreb International Review of Economics & Business

"The central argument of Eric Helleiner's important and original new book is that economic development was a core goal of the Bretton Woods architects.... He marshals impressive new evidence to show that... U.S. policy makers focused as much―or more―on the development needs and aspirations of poorer countries as on the future reconstruction requirements of war-torn Europe and Asia.... The tragedy, says Helleiner, is that despite initial good intentions, the Bretton Woods system ultimately failed to live up to its developmental promise. Post-war idealism was soon eclipsed by Cold War realities, leaving the IMF and the World Bank as tools, not of global development, but of western anti-communist crusaders and free market ideologues."

Author: John Hancock Source: Literary Review of Canada

About the Author:

Eric Helleiner is Professor and Faculty of Arts Chair in International Political Economy, Department of Political Science and Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo. He is the author of States and the Reemergence of Global Finance: From Bretton Woods to the 1990s and The Making of National Money: Territorial Currencies in Historical Perspective and coeditor of The Great Wall of Money: Power and Politics in China’s International Monetary Relations, all from Cornell.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1501704370
• ISBN 13: 9781501704376
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 316