Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA. The Bretton Woods Agreements are a set of international economic rules agreed in 1944 between the major industrialized countries of the Western world. In practice, the Bretton Woods Agreements tied the dollar to gold, and the currencies of other nations to the dollar. The Bretton Woods Agreements were the result of negotiations held from July 1 to 22, 1944, while the war was still underway, at a hotel in Bretton Woods, a town in the US state of New Hampshire. They were essentially operational for about thirty years, when in 1971 they were superseded by the Smithsonian Agreement signed by the G10. The legal system that emerged from these agreements, a set of rules and procedures to control international monetary policy, was the first example in human history of a fully negotiated monetary order as a means of governing relations between independent countries.
