The centrality of the Bretton Woods international conference (1944) in the reshaping of international economic and financial institutions in the post-war world has always seemed obvious. In this story Keynes has been recognised as a key player, given his central role as a key advisor of the British government (despite his now precarious health). The mythology of Bretton Woods has often focussed on a supposed clash between a ‘Keynes Plan’ that sought to introduce the concept of ‘bancor’ as an international currency, and a ‘White Plan’ that was the brainchild of the leading US economist Harry White. But this way of telling the story misses the fact that ‘bancor’, for all its suggestive implications, was never put to the conference as an option. Instead we see Keynes – sadder and wiser than in Paris perhaps – accommodating all along to an American view that ‘a deal’ had to be struck. It was one that crucially involved Britain in paying for the benefit of Lend-Lease by adopting the mantra of ‘non-discrimination’. So here is a revealing example of the priority for expediency over truth in a real-world situation.

The final three substantive chapters of this book focus on the ways in which the Americo-Liberian elite leveraged Liberia’s sovereignty during the twentieth century to generate rents which helped sustain their rule over the indigenous majority. Chapter 8 examines the flow of foreign aid to Liberia beginning during World War II. During the 1940s, Liberia became one of the leading recipients of American aid, beginning with Lend-Lease in 1942. In scale, its aid was comparable in per capita terms to Asian countries like Korea or Marshall Plan recipients like the United Kingdom. As in other countries, what began as military aid through Lend-Lease to support the development of an airfield and a port to be used by US forces became a larger aid program and an important part of American economic diplomacy after the war. Histories of American policies during this period are generally told from the perspective of the US government. The history of Liberia offers the opportunity to view the rise of foreign aid from the perspective of the recipient country. The chapter shows that while Liberian officials often bristled at American interference, they continued to solicit aid as part of efforts to expand service provision while at the same time restricting political competition.

While virtually all the historians who have discussed the reasons behind Hitler’s decision to declare war on the US agree that he was resigned to an imminent entry of the US into WW 2, so far no one has made a plausible case for one particular political or military move by Washington tipping him over the edge. From the “Destroyers-for-Bases” deal of September 1940 to the de-facto abolition of the 1939 Neutrality Law an already pro-Allied Roosevelt administration got progressively more and more involved in the war against Nazi Germany while still claiming the status of a neutral. Assessing which of these steps was decisive in predisposing the German leader towards a declaration of war is a major challenge, since no document for internal consumption summarising his thoughts on the matter has ever emerged.

A detailed examination of military and diplomatic records, together with his acolytes’ personal diaries indicates that it was the passing of the legislation which gutted the US Neutrality Law (November 13th) which is most likely to have put him in a frame of mind where war with the US was seen as something inevitable, since this guaranteed the imminent arrival of US civilian shipping in the NW approaches of the UK.