This introduction develops some ideas for thinking about the compartmentalized nature of international political economy under Bretton Woods and the institutional settlements of energy and finance that made it possible. After initial institutional failures, this compartmentalized global architecture came to oversee a politics of growth that eventually incorporated the Soviet Union as an enthusiastic participant. The Soviets likewise participated in the dismantling of that architecture precisely by helping rearrange the relationships of energy and finance that had established it in the first place. This book shows that a history of the development of post–Bretton Woods capitalism requires the inclusion of the Soviet Union as one of its architects.