International Economic Co-Operation and the World Bank

On December 14, 1945, the House of Commons voted 314 to 50 to ratify the Agreements negotiated at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, nearly a year and a half earlier. Lord Keynes had returned from Washington to defend the Fund and the Bank, of which he and Harry White were the principal authors, as well as to justify an American loan to Britain - following President Harry S. Truman's abrupt postwar decision to terminate all land-lease assistance to its wartime allies, an event which induced the ...