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 were 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. 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.