Keynes’s writing is bookended by major exertions on international monetary subjects. Indian Currency and Finance (1913, hereafter ICF), generally regarded as a masterly description of the operation of the gold standard, opened an intellectual career centrally concerned with matters monetary. It closed with the Bretton Woods proposals for a new international monetary system for the post-war international world emerging from the Thirty Years’ Crisis of 1914–45, based on a thorough critique of the imperial one that entered it. As originally proposed, these arrangements were designed to allow ‘each country to pursue its national objectives of full employment and price stability’ (Dostaler 2007, p. 206), rather than sacrifice them to exchange rate stability as the gold standard required. These proposals were defeated by the US’s vain desire to install the dollar as the world’s currency on the model of sterling before 1914 (Desai 2013). However, the regularity with which they pop up in discussions of the reform of the international monetary system even today shows that they were in advance of historical possibilities (Desai 2009) and remain a lodestar.
