Bretton Woods Reconsidered: State Autonomy, Gold and Global finance

Speaker: Eric Monnet, Paris School of Economics
Series: Core Seminar in Economic and Social History
Note: Note different room

Eric Monnet will survey his research on the Bretton Woods system, which challenges the familiar portrayal of Bretton Woods (1944-1971) as a golden age of financial stability and macroeconomic autonomy, and discuss the questions and challenges ahead. Viewed against the troubles of financial globalization since the 1980s, the period is often understood as one in which capital controls insulated domestic policy from international financial flows and exchange-rate pressures, while gold had lost its central monetary role. The historical evidence paints a more unsettled picture. Countries struggled with their external accounts, monetary arrangements were fiercely contested nationally and internationally, and gold remained considerably more important than usually acknowledged. The arrangements envisaged in 1944 never operated as expected: Bretton Woods evolved through repeated adaptations to the re-emergence of global finance. Rather than a trouble-free interlude governed by stable, clearly defined rules, it appears as a period of transition, negotiation and improvisation. Its history reveals both the difficulties and the possibilities of reconciling state autonomy with global finance, while raising new questions about international monetary cooperation and the sources of domestic policy autonomy.