The Gold Standard and the International Monetary System, 1900–1939

In this study Professor Drummond surveys the workings of the international financial system from America's adherence to the gold standard until World War II, drawing on recent scholarly work in several languages.

Professor Drummond begins by defining the gold standard and then proceeds to analyse the operation of the system itself. Although economic historians have referred to it as a 'system,' in that individual countries' arrangements fitted together coherently, it was neither consciously designed nor internationally administered. Each country's gold standard arrangements derived from the law or custom peculiar to that country, but they shared common elements which Professor Drummond isolates.

The history of the gold standard's operation is then considered, through the disturbances during and after World War I, the unsatisfactory reconstruction of the 1920's and the final collapse in the 1930's, together with subsequent efforts at a new kind of reconstruction. Professor Drummond concludes that the factors militating against the successful operation of the gold standard were too great to be overcome by the individual efforts of financiers, central bankers and politicians.