Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T23:31:20.717Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - THE EARLY STAGES, I914–I915

from Part I - The Treasury in the War Years

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2012

Get access

Summary

‘I was in the Treasury throughout the war and all the money we either lent or borrowed passed through my hands’—so Keynes, speaking in 1923, airily described his wartime duties. He hardly exaggerated, as he was directly concerned with the strategy of financing Britain's war expenditure and that of her allies, and finally took charge of a division of his own responsible for all of Britain's inter-allied financial arrangements.

He kept a mass of minutes, memoranda, first and second drafts, reports and printed papers documenting this period of his life. By itself, however, the material is incomplete and inconclusive. The records of the Treasury and the Cabinet Office, now made available at the Public Record Office, help in large measure to fill in the gaps and reveal a remarkably influential role for a man between the ages of 31 and 36.

When Keynes entered the Treasury it was a comparatively small group, and the war still seemed a small war. At first he had many jobs, but as the war went on Britain's financial involvement mushroomed, and this national burden became his particular care. The following section does not provide an exhaustive account of his work. The papers reproduced have been chosen to show the different kinds of things that he was doing and his manner of doing them. They are interesting for the light that they throw on his development as an economist or on the similarities and differences in his thinking at this stage and in later years.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Royal Economic Society
Print publication year: 1978

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×