Bretton Woods and the Postwar Order

1944 CE — North America, The Allied powers

Today: New Hampshire, USA (and the institutions it founded)

With the war still on, delegates from forty-four nations met at a New Hampshire hotel and designed the postwar economy: currencies pegged to a dollar backed by gold, plus the institutions that became the IMF and World Bank. The aim was explicit — avoid repeating the 1930s, when collapsing trade and beggar-thy-neighbour devaluation had fed the rise of dictators. The United Nations followed a year later. It was an attempt to engineer, in advance, against the patterns that had just destroyed the world.

Worth knowing: Keynes argued for a global currency he called the bancor, issued by no country. He lost to the American plan, and the dollar became the world's reserve currency — a defeat economists still argue about eighty years later.

Pattern: State formation & institutional founding — A durable new order — a state, an institution, a system of rule — is deliberately built and consolidated, outlasting the people who founded it.

Entry 217 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.