Reinterpreting Bretton Woods: International Development and the Neglected Origins of Embedded Liberalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This article offers a reinterpretation of the origins of the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreements, one that is of particular significance to scholars of international development. Conventional wisdom holds that the Agreements were primarily a product of US–British negotiations between 1942 and 1944, in which little attention was paid to international development issues and the concerns of poorer countries. This article demonstrates that the innovative ‘embedded liberal’ vision of Bretton Woods was in fact first put forward in the context of US–Latin American financial relations in the 1938–42 period, and that this experience influenced the subsequent Bretton Woods negotiations. The analysis highlights that the architects of Bretton Woods did not ignore development issues but rather attempted to pioneer a new model for both North–North and North–South economic relations. If this has been subsequently overlooked by historians, it may be because this latter feature of Bretton Woods was quickly buried by US policy makers in the immediate post‐war years. This historical reinterpretation helps both to explain some important puzzles about the origins of the Bretton Woods Agreements and to shed new light on the place of international development issues in the evolution of the post‐war international economic order.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".