From Bretton Woods to Petrodollar: Monetary Architecture, Oil Agreements, and the Construction of American Financial Power

The dominance of the American dollar was never inevitable. It was engineered — first in a New Hampshire resort hotel in 1944, where forty-four nations agreed to anchor the postwar monetary order to a single currency, and then again in the early 1970s, when the collapse of gold convertibility threatened that dominance until a series of bilateral agreements with Saudi Arabia quietly replaced one foundation with another.

This book traces the full arc of dollar hegemony from the Bretton Woods co...