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Benn Steil , The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (Princeton : Princeton University Press , 2013, 480 pp., $29.95/£19.95, ISBN 978-0691-14909-7 )
Book Reviews
The conference of Bretton Woods, held in the summer of 1944 with the goal of redesigning the world monetary order, represents one of the most ambitious and exciting moments in financial history. Economic theory and diplomacy came together to shape a system that functioned at world level until the 1970s. In his book, Benn Steil provides a vivid account of this conference as well as its premises and reverberations, proposing new anecdotal evidence and insights as well as historical interpretations.
The saga of Bretton Woods cannot be disentangled from the two main characters that dominated it: the head of the US delegation, Harry Dexter White, and his British counterpart, John Maynard Keynes. Steil starts his account by providing detailed portraits of the two. White, son of Lithuanian immigrants, was born and raised in Boston. His late interest in economics had led him to obtain a PhD at Harvard. Shortly after, he started his career in the US Treasury Department where he served, climbing up its hierarchy, until he was appointed head of the US delegation at Bretton Woods. White is portrayed as more ambitious than intellectual, with a strong personality and a fair amount of arrogance. Keynes could not have been...