America and the Birth of Global Aid

This book investigates the birth and early evolution of the international aid regime in the 1940s and 1950s, considering how America established a postwar economic order in which aid was balanced against the establishment of the IMF as an instrument of economic discipline.

Through the combination of the carrot of global aid and the monetarist stick of the IMF, the US was able to successfully draw most of the newly decolonising countries of the global south of the world into the global capitalist system, ultimately sowing the seeds for neoliberalism and the Washington consensus. The book tells this story by assessing key moments in the evolution of the global aid regime, from the Bretton Woods Agreement, to the Marshall Plan and the first American economic assistance programs to Western Europe and Japan, through to the evolution of the IMF’s policies in the late 1940s and 1950s and the creation of the first global bilateral development aid program and the expansion of multilateral assistance programs in the 1950s. Through these events, the book demonstrates that the evolution of international aid and the IMF as an instrument of economic discipline are fundamentally entwined, and we can’t understand either story without the other.

The in-depth analysis in this book will be of interest to historians and researchers of international relations, political economy, and global development, but it also has much to teach us about today’s global order.