Money-Blindness: Keynes’s “Permanent Social Fabric” and the Historiography of Decolonization

Aaron Jakes, The New School

Writing in the autumn of 1923, John Maynard Keynes observed that the profound uncertainty and upheaval of his historical present had cast new doubts upon the established wisdom of even the very recent past. “When,” he remarked, “the actual events of a hundred years have not disturbed his illusions, the average man regards what has been normal for three generations as a part of the permanent social fabric. The course of events during the nineteenth century favoured such ideas.” For the better part of a century, the workings of the British-managed international gold standard had allowed Keynes’s compatriots to take the stable value of money for granted. The epochal crisis of the Great War and its aftermath, however, had revealed the economic thought and practice of the nineteenth century to be premised on an utter anomaly. There was, he now judged, “no historical warrant for expecting money to be represented even by a constant quantity of a particular metal, far less by a constant purchasing power.” This paper takes up Keynes’s striking observation about the anomalous character of the nineteenth century as a clue to the long-unacknowledged mismatch between the historical ubiquity and intensity of struggles over monetary policy within the long process of decolonization and the historiographically marginal status of those same struggles. Focusing in particular on the case of modern Egypt, the first part of the paper argues that dominant approaches to the history of economic nationalism in the twentieth century presuppose the persistence of monetary stability peculiar to the nineteenth century. The second part reexamines several key moments in the history of decolonization to show how control over the supply and value of money had, by the dramatic moment of the Suez Crisis, become central to Egyptian conceptions of national sovereignty.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 126. Economic Value in the Post-Colonial State: Egypt, India, and China