In the history of interwar international monetary and financial affairs one could hardly find any other single figure than Montagu Norman whose ideas and ambitions proved so influential in the process of Europe's monetary stabilisation.

Central bankers failed in their efforts to reconstruct the international gold standard on a durable basis after World War I. The gold-exchange standard did not unite them in a managed international system in the 1920s, and it perished with little regret in 1931. Stephen V. O. Clarke's monograph on central bank co-operation sees ‘considerable merit’ in the stabilisation efforts from 1924 to 1928, followed by failure to maintain the system from 1928 to 1931.1 Critics have pointed out with justice that co-operation was irregular before 1928, and that central banks continued to co-operate after 1931.2 Clarke recognizes that no conceivable improvements in central bank co-operation could have coped with the combination of political and economic convulsions in 1931; national goals necessarily took priority in central bank policies, and international objectives were determined by national experience and interest.3

With his sharp denunciation of the ‘old fetishes of so-called international bankers’ for fixed exchange rates on the gold-exchange standard, President Franklin D. Roosevelt allegedly consigned the World Economic and Monetary Conference to failure.1 The conference had been convened in June 1933 to tackle the crippling levels of ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ economic policies which were strangling the international economy during the Great Depression; its brief was so appealing and its concerns so broad, that sixty-five nations came to London that summer. But from the outset of conference preparations, which began in the autumn of 1932, the issue of central banking co-operation was to highlight many of the difficulties which plagued not only co-operative central bank efforts to revive the international economy but also dilemmas which faced central banks in their relations with their domestic governments.

Over the past decade there has been a great flowering of writings concerned with financial and monetary history, and the present four volumes are each excellent examples of the particular sub-species that now flourish in this bed of historical specialism. That edited by Eichengreen and Lindert is a conference volume, that of Wheelock is a revised doctoral thesis and Williamson's is in the classic mould of the historical monograph, whereas Fforde's is a commissioned history.

The last years of the Cold War have produced a bumper crop of studies of its beginnings, and the books reviewed here are a part of it. Anne Deighton's, Cyril Buffet's and Saki Dockrill's monographs are succinct and thoroughly well-written histories based on extensive archival research. Olaf Mager's book, like the former three a well-converted PhD thesis, takes more of a political science approach, looking at the historical commitment of Britain's forces to the defence of Continental Europe in the light of its continuing importance. Klaus A. Maier's and Wilhelm Meier-Dornberg's examinations of Western policies towards the European Defence Community (EDC) project form part of the ambitious multi-volume series on the beginning of West German security policy, edited by the office of military history of the Federal Republic. Hermann-Josef Rupieper's colossal monograph on US policy towards Germany, like Maier's and Meier-Dotnberg's studies of the EDC phase in the evolution of German rearmament, is based on enormously comprehensive multi-national archival research, where the first four books mentioned drew mainly on the archives of one country. The volume on Germany and the Marshall Plan edited by Charles Maier and Giinter Bischof, and the Gottinger Arbeitskreis's volume on the German question from 1953 to 1955, are both collections of multi-author articles concerned with a common theme.