ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the origins and historical development of what we today call 'global financial governance'. It examines the 19th-century origins of 'global' financial governance, to illustrate how both private institutions and state agencies were drawn towards the international level to manage what became in effect a global financial system based around the operation of the international gold standard. The chapter canvasses the 'long' 20th century, a period dominated in turn by efforts to re-establish the conditions for global finance after the disaster of World War I, then to contain global finance after World War II and finally during the last decades of the century to internationalize the institutional pillars of financial governance to allow for a genuinely global financial system to emerge. It outlines the current set of arrangements within which most of the issues associated with financial governance will be addressed over the foreseeable future.
