The public life of John Maynard Keynes began with his appointment to the India Office as a junior clerk at the age of twenty-three. He stayed at the India Office only two years before embarking on his career in economics at Cambridge and during this time was much preoccupied with the writing of a dissertation on probability. The phase was crucial, however, in that it led to his acquaintance with the intricacies of the Indian financial system and eventually, through a combination of natural interest, the trust and encouragement of India Office colleagues, and a crisis that put the Indian currency situation in the foreground of public discussion, resulted in the writing of his first book, Indian Currency and Finance, and his creative role with the Royal Commission on Indian Finance and Currency. This is the main theme of the chapter that follows-although it was only one of the multifarious activities, academic and otherwise, crowding Keynes's early years at Cambridge.

The papers left from this period of Keynes's life are comparatively few and sketchy. What there are consist of a few memoranda written for the India Office, some lecture notes, some newspaper clippings, a small amount of correspondence. The correspondence, before the advent of the typewriter, is one-sided, unless Keynes considered a letter of his own to be of sufficient moment to make and keep a first draft in his own hand or to have a copy made-as he fortunately quite often did.