“Asia” at Bretton Woods: India, China, and Australasia in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Contrary to past scholarship, this chapter argues that the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 was the site of an important, and surprising, North–South dialogue. India, the only nonindependent delegation, advocated greater quotas in the International Monetary Fund for less-developed countries, while China argued that the IMF’s mandate should include development and industrialization. Australia and New Zealand also supported more voting equality and the development mandate, and added their own proposals for improving commodity producers’ terms-of-trade. Thus, development was discussed at the Bretton Woods Conference; the most powerful newly industrialized economies of today, India and China, were key advocates for it; and Australia and New Zealand played important roles in forcing transatlantic powers to acknowledge it.