Well before dawn broke on June 17, 1944, a week and a half after Allied forces invaded German-occupied France on D-Day, the Cunard Line's majestic RMS Queen Mary left port from Gourock, Scotland. Hitler himself had promised $250,000 and the Iron Cross to whomever sank the elusive ship, but, zigzagging the Atlantic to evade Nazi submarines, she safely arrived in New York six days later. On board she carried 2,654 bags of mail, 2,987 German prisoners of war, and one Lord John Maynard Keynes, traveling with numerous delegations of economists bound for an epochal conference to “win the peace” in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Maria Berg Reinertsen's snappy The Journey to Bretton Woods: The Beginning of the World of Yesterday is a spirited account of the delegates’ voyage across the Atlantic and the ways in which their meetings during the crossing influenced the final articles presented at Bretton Woods. In short, the boat ride offers us new perspectives on the establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank), and ultimately the “liberal world order” that has characterized and defined the last seventy or so years. As such, the book is also a thoughtful meditation on the economic history of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as on contemporary debates about globalization, development, and the ongoing consequences of the 2008 financial crisis. Beyond this, it is a hell of a good read.

Trained as a macroeconomist, Reinertsen is a renowned journalist and fixture of the Norwegian intelligentsia. Her extended essay is intended for a popular audience, and its novel structure and multiple layers may be its most impressive achievement. Though the chapters are divided into segments representing the different days of the Queen Mary’s crossing, each event, character, and artifact represented is put in a dialogue with multiple pasts and presents. On one level, the book places its protagonists in their historical context, including the ongoing V2 bombings of London and more or less contemporary figures such as Stefan Zweig, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Beyond this, Reinertsen places them in larger intellectual debates over political economy, most colorfully through Keynes's reading of Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom at sea, as well as the afterlives of the people, events, and ideas in question, leading up to our own day (p. 121). Finally, and quite remarkably, the voyage to Bretton Woods is framed by the author's own experiences, whether reacting to the 1999 siege of Seattle, interviewing IMF officials, or hunting down lost manuscripts. “Nature,” she rightly notes, “is a careless archivist” (p. 23). The result of her efforts is a deeply personal form of literary performance art devoted to one of the cardinal moments in the history of global capitalism.

Though much of the material will be familiar to scholars—and this reader, at least, would have liked deeper engagements with the ideas in play and even the protagonists on the stage—Reinertsen's greatest contribution may be in simply bringing the journey and its protagonists to life in new ways. Through biographies, memoirs, letters, and archival materials she beautifully renders the ambience, rhythms, and stakes of debates on board the ship. The focus may be on Keynes, “a man,” Reinertsen dryly notes, “about whom we know far too much,” and more broadly the British delegation, which counted the luminary London School of Economics economist and great diarist Lionel Robbins among its members (p. 68). Yet we are also introduced to such colorful figures as the Dutch “womanizer” and later executive director of the IMF and World Bank “Wim” Beyen; the Greek finance minister Kyriakos Varvaressos (ably counterpoised with his latter-day successor Yanis Varoufakis); the ship's captain, James Bisset; and, at length, Norway's own “wrangler” Wilhelm Keilhau, described by Robbins as “a queer, Peer Gyntish figure, with an explosive voice and absurd habits of gesticulation” (p. 42). As Reinertsen herself notes, “the Journey to Bretton Woods is a story about men; white men between 30 and 70 who shape the world in their image” (pp. 48–49).

It is at this intersection of the individual and the aggregate, the human and the abstract, that The Journey to Bretton Woods truly shines. A particularly poignant passage uses Robbins's musings, upon entering New York harbor, about how “odd” it was that “the sky-scraper, which, of all forms of architecture, is the product of the most intense communal activity, should, aesthetically, stand for something so completely different” as a preamble for interrogating the degree to which “humans fall out of view of economic theory” when “the sum of activities becomes market reason, one which individual workers and consumers, yes even entire countries cannot resist” (p. 190). After reading passages such as this, the reader is frequently left wanting more. Given the nature of the project, however, this may well be the intended effect.

Much like the RMS Queen Mary herself, which never sailed steadily even in calm waters, the Bretton Woods system too suffered from “inherent construction flaws,” resulting largely from the ideological, geopolitical, and temperamental differences between its chief negotiators (p. 75). The United States was preparing for a postwar world order in its image; the British Empire braced for postwar debts and eventual dissolution; emerging powers like India and China aimed for industrialization and development. Together, they all sought, as so often both before and after, to pacify a system of economically interdependent yet politically independent states, and in so doing they faced ever-pertinent challenges of relative power as well as timeless tensions between democracy and expertise, pragmatism and idealism. Whatever its inherent weaknesses, the Bretton Woods system did inaugurate a “golden age of capitalism” (p. 172n). Still, Reinertsen rightly asks whether the IMF that eventually saw the light of day, and evolved during the twentieth century, was a child of Keynesianism at all, or whether, with its insistence on austerity and structural adjustments, it was not rather a “changeling” or, indeed, a “trollunge,” a “scalawag” (pp. 179, 181).

What might the world have looked like, Reinertsen wonders, if Keynes's suggested regulations to limit current account surpluses and deficits between nations had been implemented as he intended? In the 1930s, inequalities within and between countries had driven them to protectionism and xenophobia. Bretton Woods emerged from the tragedies that followed, aiming for “a regulated globalization, different from both unilateral protectionism and free-flow capitalism” (p. 193). Its system never lived up to its expectations, and, following its collapse, we again find ourselves facing similar dynamics. Must the lesson be relearned? And to what extent, The Journey to Bretton Woods asks, are we simply reading our own needs into the past when looking back at the voyage?

The book ends, laconically, by returning to the RMS Queen Mary, today a “haunted hotel” permanently moored off Long Beach, California. Is it facile to observe that we again find ourselves far out at sea, zigzagging to stay afloat? Perhaps. But, appropriately, the ship continues to offer two permanent tours: “the ghost tour and the historical tour” (p. 207). Not unlike the ship that once carried its delegates across the Atlantic, the history of the Bretton Woods system itself represents, in this book and for us, not only the story of how we got where we are, but also the haunting ghosts of futures past.