Plate 1 John Maynard Keynes. A rare image of John Maynard Keynes at work from the King’s College Archive, Cambridge University.
Plate 2 John Maynard Keynes and Jan Christiaan Smuts. Smuts attended the Paris Peace Conference and played a “central but complex” role in the making of the Economic Consequences.
Plate 3 Original proofreading copy of the Economic Consequences, with Keynes’s notes. Keynes reduced the length of the manuscript through extensive cuts as he revised. One key motivation was to make sure that the book could be produced at reduced cost and thus sold at an accessible price for the widest audience.
Plate 4 Keynes’s mother, Florence Ada Keynes. Maynard’s friends affectionately referred to her as “the good mother Keynes,” and although she was committed to so many important causes, her family always came first and she was immensely proud of her elder son.
Plate 5 A letter by John Maynard Keynes to his mother Florence, written during the negotiations at Versailles in 1918. “Everything is always decided for some reason other than the real merits of the case […] Still and even more confidently I attribute all our misfortunes to George. We are governed by a crook […] In the meantime old Asquith who I believe might yet save us is more and more of a student and lover of slack country life and less and less inclined for the turmoil. Here he is extremely well in health and full of wisdom and fit for anything in the world - except controversy. He finds, therefore, in patriotism an easy excuse for his naked disinclination to attack the Gov[ernment]. People say that the politician would attack, but the patriot repair. I believe the opposite is true.’’
Plate 6 John Maynard Keynes with Carl Melchior (left) and Dudley Ward (center) in Trèves (Trier), Germany, in 1919. Dr. Melchior, a prominent German banker, was part of a German delegation that met with French, British, and American financial officials in January 1919 to negotiate German payment for food imports in the light of potential reparations. Ward was a member of Keynes’s Treasury staff and a former student at Cambridge.
Plate 7 Letter to Keynes from G. D. H. Cole, proposing the publication of a cheaper Labour Research Department edition of Keynes’s book. The very great success of The Economic Consequences of the Peace in the United Kingdom was in no small part due to a publishing deal Keynes had with the Labour Research Department, who brought out and sold a cheap version of the book. Total sales of this edition nearly topped 10,000 copies.
Plate 8 Ali Fethi Okyar, translator of the Economic Consequences into Turkish and later Prime Minister of Turkey, in the company of Kemal Atatürk. Ali Fethi translated Keynes’s book in 1920 while imprisoned by the British in Malta. The translation appeared in print in 1922.
Plate 9 The 1922 Turkish edition of The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
Plate 10 Keynes with US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. Keynes led the UK delegation to the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference that designed the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
Plate 11 Keynes in 1918. Under enormous strain owing to his wartime duties at the Treasury, Keynes relaxed in the countryside on weekends with Bloomsbury friends or at the home of the former prime minister, Herbert Asquith.
Plate 12 Keynes circa 1911. This portrait was taken after Keynes had returned to King’s from the India Office.
Plate 13 John Maynard Keynes and Bertil Ohlin in Antwerp, 1935. Keynes’s 1929 exchange with Ohlin over the “German transfer problem,” published in the Economic Journal, raised fundamental questions for future research in international macroeconomics.
Plate 14 Participants at the September 2019 Economic Consequences centenary conference, King’s College, Cambridge.
Plate 15 Lord Skidelsky during the conference, leaning on the black government despatch box found at Keynes’s brother Geoffrey’s home, Lammas House, Brinkley, Suffolk. The box carries the cypher of King George V and was presumably issued to Maynard while he was working at the Treasury from 1915. One of his friends tells the story that he used to come to their support, when attending tribunals in connection with conscription, carrying an official black box with the royal cypher on it, in order to intimidate the panel. Presumably this is the same box!
