ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: The Chatham House circle and the making of the culture of development and of investment during WWII
Author: Farese Giovanni
Rosenstein Rodan (1902-1985) is well known for his 1940s two contributions on the economic development of backward areas published on the Economic Journal and on International Affairs, respectively. Yet few know where and whence these contributions came out. As early as 1941 Rosenstein Rodan was appointed Secretary of the Economic Group of the Committee on Post-War Reconstruction established in London at 10, St. James Square, at Chatham House (i.e. the Royal Institute for International Affairs created at the end of WWI). Here he worked intensely. Here economists Arndt, Baranski, Marjolin, Meade, Stone, Varvaressos and others gathered during the war. Here seminars were held to discuss issues in international economics and world order well before, and in view of, the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. Study Group Papers circulated among the members of the circle. A consensus on world prosperity and its means emerged along with monetary and financial national and international plans for the reconstruction and the development of the world. New institutions were invoked. This paper aims at showing the intellectual role played by this circle in the years between the Atlantic Charter (1941) and the inauguration of the Institutions of Bretton Woods (1946) and after, signalling the influential position of its members in post-war years, from the OEEC to the World Bank. The paper also uses unpublished archival sources from the archive of Chatham House.
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