Abstract
Keynes left the India Office in July 1909 and took a busman’s holiday in the Orkneys with his friend Duncan Grant, during which he revised his dissertation on Probability. Following the holiday he settled down in Cambridge for the Michaelmas term of 1909. Since his first lectures were not due to be given until January 1910, he utilised the time to finish his dissertation (5 December 1908) which secured him the coveted Fellowship of King’s College (1909). Around this time Sir Arthur Godley wrote to him sincerely hoping that Keynes would ‘continue to keep an eye on Indian affairs, and to write about them as opportunities occur’ (letter dated 30 March 1909).1 This aspiration of one of Keynes’s senior superiors in the India Office was more than fulfilled both by design and circumstance. In fact, Keynes’s departure from the India Office, far from breaking his involvement with Indian affairs, seems to have strengthened and enlarged it. The bulk of his writings and public activities in the period 1909–11 related to India as did a fair proportion of his lectures for the Cambridge Economics Tripos. Keynes wrote extensively for the Economic Journal on Indian economic themes, both monetary and non-monetary, a combination which he never equalled or even approached subsequently.
‘In your economic studies don’t forget the field for observation which India offers’. Sir Thomas Holderness
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Notes
R. S. Sayers, ‘The Young Keynes’, Economic Journal, Vol. 82, No. 326, June 1972, p. 593. Sayers has drawn on his own full notes of Keynes’s lecture on 26 November 1928 to substantiate this.
Michell McAlpin in ‘Price Movements and Fluctuations in Economic Activity, 1860–1947’ in The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. 2 c.1757-c.1970, edited by Dharma Kumar (Cambridge University Press, 1983) gives statistical evidence to substantiate that the increase in rail mileage reduced ‘the spread between prices in different places’, p. 885.
J. M. Keynes, Review of H. Stanley Jevons, The Future of Exchange and the Indian Currency, (Oxford University Press, Indian Branch, 1922), in Economic Journal, March 1923, in Collected Writings, Vol. XI, p. 46.
K. N. Chaudhuri, ‘Foreign Trade and Balance of Payments’, Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. 2, c.1757-c.1970 (Cambridge University Press, 1983 ), p. 873.
Theodore Morison, The Economic Transition in India (London, 1911; reprinted 1916), p. 193, cited by Bipan Chandra, p. 677.
Dharma Kumar, ‘The Fiscal System’, in The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. 2, c.1757-c.1970 (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 937.
A. Heston ‘National Income’ in The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. 2, c.1757-c.1970 (ed.) Dharma Kumar (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Roy M. MacLeod, ‘Scientific Advice for British India: Imperial Perceptions and Administrative Goals, 1898–1923,’ Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1975, p. 345.
See Pramathnath Banerjee, A History of Indian Taxation (London, 1930), pp. 249–313.
Dr Pattabhi Sitaramayya, The History of the Indian National Congress, Vol. I, 1885–1935 (Padma Publications, Bombay, 1946), p. 50.
Dharma Kumar, ‘The Fiscal System of India’, in The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. 2, c.1757-c.1970 (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 930.
Harry G. Johnson, ‘The Early Economics of Keynes’ in The Shadow of Keynes, (ed.) Elizabeth S. Johnson and Harry G. Johnson ( Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1978 ), p. 109.
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© 1989 Anand Chandavarkar
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Chandavarkar, A. (1989). Varied Passages to India. In: Keynes and India. Keynesian Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374775_3
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