Since its founding at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, the World Bank has grown into one of the most powerful international institutions situating itself at the centre of the dominant economic and financial system which seeks to control a majority of the world's resources and markets. It also dominates the international discourse on development through its own research and publications and through its funding and consultancies that span a wide cross-section of the world's social scientists and research institutions.

Originally set up as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the primary roles of these institutions was to be involved in the efforts to reconstruct a war-devastated Europe, to regulate the international monetary and financial order and to restructure international finance and currency relationships after the conclusion of World War II. The productive capacities of many economies in Europe had been devastated and needed an urgent financial infusion. Additionally, they agreed on implementing a system of fixed exchange rates with the U.S. dollar as the key currency. While the IBRD and the IMF were meant to be involved in the reconstruction effort, another element of their mandate was to provide guarantees to private banking institutions who were lending money for developmental projects in other parts of the less industrialized world. Ironically, the IBRD provided less than $500m while the US controlled Marshall Plan contributed nearly $ 13 b. As one of America's leading historians noted, much of this was to lay the foundation for the advancement of US geopolitical goals particularly the containment of the growing power of the Soviet Union.

It is important to note that at that early stage, these institutions had no control over the economic decisions of individual government's or in the direction and content of national policy. The nature of the birthing process of the IBRD has significantly marked the identity and the character of the World Bank not just as an instrument to further American geopolitical interests but also in its integral relationship with the most powerful think tanks and alliances of private capital.