Jamie Martin

In the early years of World War Two, when Allied and Axis planners began to imagine what the postwar world might look like, the question of how to prevent a return to the economic chaos of the 1930s was uppermost in their minds. In a series of negotiations that began in 1941 and culminated in the Bretton Woods Conference of July 1944, British and American officials debated how to re-create a stable and open capitalist world economy. What was obvious was the need to manage the interaction of national economies. Nothing like it had ever existed before.