It also includes academic histories of the international monetary system (Eichengreen 2008 Helleiner 1994 Yago, Asai and Itoh 2015), the views of protagonists of that history (Solomon 1982), and the official and semi-official histories of the IMF (de Vries 1976, 1985, 1987 Horsefield 1969 James 1996). This includes old and new histories of US–UK negotiations in the late war years and the agreement finally reached at Bretton Woods (Conway 2015 Gardner 1969 Steil 2013), as well as more recent analyses of the role of developing countries in those negotiations (Helleiner 2014). The histories of the international monetary system and of the IMF in particular have, of course, been the subject of significant attention. This chapter focuses on the international monetary system, as an introduction to the issues that are analysed in detail in the rest of the volume. In any case, there has never been another moment in the history of international cooperation that matches the end of the Second World War and the early post-war years. Almost half a century later, the World Trade Organization was created. There were, of course, disappointments, particularly the incapacity to launch an additional leg of the system of economic cooperation, the International Trade Organization agreed to in Havana in 1948, as the US Congress failed to ratify the agreement only one of its components, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, approved one year earlier, was put in place. These success stories were particularly remarkable in the light of the failures of international political and economic cooperation in the 1930s. The 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which created the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), and the San Francisco Conference, which created the United Nations one year later, were major landmarks in international cooperation-true ‘acts of creation’, to use the title of one of the best-known books on the founding of the United Nations (Schlesinger 2004).
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