The extractive foundations of Bretton Woods: Gold, Apartheid, and the racial politics of monetary order

Abstract

This article revisits gold’s role within Bretton Woods, contributing to recent efforts to develop a more global and thematically inclusive international political economy (IPE). Challenging dominant representations of the gold issue, I foreground Bretton Woods’ hidden extractive foundations through a focus on the racial politics of South African gold mining. Combining theories of extractivism with new archival research, I revisit two episodes of post-war monetary politics to uncover hidden connections between extraction, race, and monetary order. I argue that the relationship between international liquidity, monetary stability, and economic expansion under Bretton Woods pivoted on gold supply from Apartheid South Africa, threading colonial continuities of racial extractivism through post-war monetary order. South African gold’s importance to international monetary stability rose in tandem with the racial brutality of Apartheid during the 1960s, transforming the extractivist foundations of gold supply from a naturalised background condition to a central concern linking the politics of international monetary stability and racial equality. I develop the concept of the ‘monetary colour line’ to trace how extractive, racial, and monetary hierarchies intersected under Bretton Woods. I show how leveraging contemporary concerns with race and extractivism disrupts settled historical understandings of IPE.