The United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference was held in July 1944 at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, where delegates from 44 nations created a new international monetary system known as the Bretton Woods system. These countries saw the opportunity for a new international system after World War II that would draw on the lessons of the previous gold standards and the experience of the Great Depression and provide for postwar reconstruction. It was an unprecedented cooperative effort for nations that had been setting up barriers between their economies for more than a decade.