This dissertation provides a historical analysis of Robert McNamara's presidency of the World Bank. The Bank, a group of intergovernmental organizations whose original body, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), was created at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 to provide financial support for postwar reconstruction and economic development, changed significantly under McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and one of the primary architects of the Vietnam War. As its President from 1968 to 1981 McNamara turned the Bank from a relatively small and passive organization into the world's preeminent development institution. The Bank's borrowing and lending portfolios, staff size, and research program greatly expanded, and its goals broadened from promoting the economic growth of developing nations to alleviating poverty within them. Under McNamara the Bank also began to play a greater role in the affairs of many borrowing countries. The Bank's growing interventionism led to the advent in 1980 of structural adjustment lending, in which the organization began to condition some of its loans on neoliberal policy changes in borrowing nations. This new direction intensified ongoing processes of international economic integration, but it also increased rates of poverty and inequality in recipient countries.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, including previously untapped Bank documents, this dissertation contextualizes the organization's transformation under McNamara within broader developments in world affairs during the time. In so doing it recovers some of the human agency frequently lost in narratives of globalization while contributing to the scholarly literature on the history of development, global governance, and the Cold War.