New Books In National Security

The story of Bretton Woods has been told by countless historians. We have a good sense of the wartime context, the negotiations themselves, the roles of many of the main actors (especially Great Britain and the United States), and the conference’s meaning for postwar global history. What can another book possibly tell us? Lots, actually.In his new book Forgotten Foundations: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order (Cornell University Press, 2018), Eric Helleiner, a political economist at Waterloo University, retells this history with fresh, more globally-searching eyes in his book Forgotten Foundations: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Era. He examines the conference’s prehistory, which he locates in the United States’ Good Neighbor Policy towards Latin America in the 1930s. He follows representatives from the Global South in and around the conference, showing how they shaped the negotiations and the final agreements. And, finally, he reveals that the conference pa