The name of Margaret Garritsen de Vries may not be the first that pops into people’s mind when thinking about the International Monetary Fund. It is through her work, as long-standing official Fund Historian, that those interested in the Fund history will travel through. An operational...

The explicit concepts of a central bank and monetary policy were not fully articulated until the 20th century, although, with some degree of circumspection, they can be used retrospectively in regard to earlier times. The oldest central banks were hardly central banks in the modern sense at...